[gbajson]

I have just spent 5 minutes trying to find any useful use cases for 'vdir'. Does anyone of have idea why other 'ls' has been created?

[JonathonW]

Someone years ago wanted a shortcut for `ls -lb`, didn't want to change aliases on every machine they use, and had access to the coreutils source?

In GNU coreutils, it's not really "another" ls; it's the same source code with a preprocessor macro set differently (ls, dir, and vdir all share the same source).