Don't feel too bad. I didn't know until reading this that sending the output from ls somewhere other than stdout would cause the output to be one-item-per-line either, and I've been using Unix and Linux platforms for a very long time.

If I wanted that behavior, I would have typed 'ls -1' also.

You probably got that into your muscle memory before 'ls' got smarter. I'm sure we all have some habits like that.