I notice prior HN comments of yours mention the physical design of the NeXT cube. I cannot say it will make you not hate software, but you still might appreciate that another alternative ls, https://github.com/c-blake/lc, both re-thinks/breaks more radically with ls-tradition and adapts well to something very similar to a terminal variant of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns used in the NeXT file tree graphical browser/navigator via simple shell process substitution composition. E.g., a 3-level scenario on an 80-column looks like:

    paste <(lc -1m25 ../..) <(lc -1m25 ..) <(lc -1m25 .)

Some shell script that uses $((COLUMNS)) arithmetic to do 2 or 4 or whatever terminal width is a pretty simple exercise for the reader and one might want to pipe to less.