Let's say you want to view a tabular blast output file.

You could
<code>
$ less <blastfile>
</code>

But because of line wrapping, the file becomes very hard to read.
It would be easier to

<code>
$ less -S <blastfile>
</code>

Now all lines are unwrapped, which makes it a lot easier to read. However, for some lines some blast output fields may not be aligned vertically with the other lines. To align them, we can use the ''column'' tool:

<code>
$ column -t $'\t' <blastfile> | less -S
</code>

Awesome! However, this is quite a long command to type, each time you want to check a blast file. For commonly invoked commands, it becomes worthwile to wrap them into a custom function.
Add to your ''.bashrc'' :

<code>
# for easy viewing of tab separated files
function coltab {
    column -t -s $'\t' $1 | less -S
}
</code>

Now we can simply view tab separated files like tabular blast output as follows:

<code>
$ coltab <blastfile>
</code>