How do I increase the width of the first column in the Terminal ls -l command?

Question

I am now running 10.9.x, but I've experienced the problem described in the question over the last several iterations of OS X.
I use bash as my interactive shell. When I display the "ls -l" command in Terminal the output is often very difficult for me to scan, because the columns in which are displayed the several fields of the records for the listed files are misaligned (different left-hand first-letter starting points for left-aligned text-valued fields; different right-hand low-digit alignment of numerical fields).
When I look more closely at the mess displayed in my Terminal window, it appears that the cause of the problem may be that no minimum width, or an inadequate minimum width, has somewhere been set or defined for the first column of each record, containing the file's "mode" string (permissions, etc.); for all records in which this string is of equal length, the succeeding columns for all fields in those records are themselves aligned.
It has not always been thus for me in the Terminal with OS X, or else I might not dream that the world could be a better place in this one respect. But if I launch an interactive csh-shell instead of bash in Mavericks today, the columns of the ls -l command there align no better.
I've found no help in the Unix man pages for the ls command. There is a COLUMNS environment  variable whose value is supposed to be used by the ls command to set the width of every column displayed, but this is not what I want to do, and in my shell "ls -l" seems to ignore the exported variable anyway.
There is also an LS_COLWIDTHS environment variable that is described as setting column widths on a field-by-field basis, at least for some fields, but the the mode column is not included among those whose width is supposed to be adjustable, and my shell seems to ignore the value of this variable as well.
I've looked in my rather simple ~/.profile and ~/.bashrc files for anything that I might plausibly suspect of producing or perpetuating this behavior, but there is nothing there. Any suggestions about how to remedy this problem?
Randy Miller

Answer 1

John,
I would like you to perform a safe boot. On reboot, press and hold the shift key at the chime, until the grey horizontal bar appears. After you type in your password, press and hold the shift key again, then click the right arrow to login, and release the shift key when your desktop appears. Move the contents of your local ~/Library/Caches into the Trash. Reboot normally. Empty your Trash.
Re-evaluate your Terminal behavior. If it now works ok, great. Otherwise, here are a sequence of screen shots of my Terminal preferences for comparison. I can use both Courier fonts without formatting issues. Click to enlarge. I use the free IR Black Terminal theme as a personal choice in OS X 10.9.4. In my ~/.bashrc file (triggered from ~/.bash_profile), I export TERM=xterm-256color, and invoke /usr/bin/tput init. Click on the following images to enlarge.