Most people find right-aligned numbers easier to scan than left-aligned numbers. Most tabular representations of numbers use right-alignment; disk usage listing

Most people find right-aligned numbers easier to scan than left-aligned numbers. Most tabular representations of numbers use right-alignment; disk usage listings, spreadsheets, SQL command prompts, etc. If I want to sort the output of `uniq -c`, I use `sort -n`, which knows about numbers even if they're left aligned. If I want to extract out the number to do something with it, I use `awk`. I think right alignment is the correct default.