bug#25553: How many coreutils rely on tabs to align things (other, than 'du'?

[Paul Eggert]

On 01/28/2017 10:13 PM, L A Walsh wrote:
>     This is already a problem

Of course. All I am saying is that we should not make it worse.

> you skirted the issue of using system-wide and per-user
> config files which might also be used for similar purpose.

That's even worse. Coreutils doesn't do that now, thank goodness.

> How can I send ls's default output through a filter
> and have it be the same as to a TTY?

'ls -C'.

> you didn't mention how the output would be re-encoded for a user's
> tab settings on output

That could be the job of 'expand'. The user's tab settings can be 
specified as arguments to 'expand'. If 'expand' doesn't have the desired 
functionality now, perhaps we should improve 'expand'. But we should not 
be modifying every program to do expansion; just 'expand'. That's the 
software tools design philosophy.