If you have a tab separated file and view it in a pager like less or more, the columns never line up. Here is a simple way to make those columns appear correct.

column -t file.tsv

For example, here is a file with three columns of words, displayed with cat

If we pass that to column with the -t option to detect the columns, we get nicely organised columns:

However, note that this is not exactly correct, notice that “Paradigm shift” has been split into two columns because the -t option uses whitespace by default, so to display the columns using tabs, we need to add a -s option:

column -t -s$'\t'