For me, -h makes it more difficult to quickly compare the sizes of files in one list by glance.
This is something that I have to do often enough that it has prevented me from adding -h to my ls alias.
I'd have to use it for a bit to be sure, but the post's suggestion seems a pretty good 'best of both worlds' solution to me.
I run into the situation more often with 'du' (when trying to find which subdirectory tree has excess junk in it), to the point that, while 'du -h' is human readable, it's not particularly sortable so:
du -hs $( du -s * | sort -k1nr,1 -k2 | head )
.... which will return the human-readable output, based on numerically sorting the full numeric output. Eyeball comparisons are easier as you're aware that results are already sorted by size.
A reasonably recent sort from GNU coreutils has a -h (and equivalent long option --human-numeric-sort) which properly sorts the output of du -h, meaning you can do:
