Would you not consider an adequate solution to be that automatic header display (for those modes that do so) would be suppressed when -noheader is given on the sqlite3 command line? As for advocacy, please rebut these reasons for usually enabling headers for columns mode: Without the column names and particularly the \-\-\-\-\- ... line appearing above the row output, distinguishing column values from the presentation can become ambiguous when there are few rows and the values contain arbitrary whitespace. The default for columns mode makes one-liner display of a table's values more convenient and unlikely to yield a confounding result. Your stated desire to make convenient the concatenation (and subsequent interpretation, presumably) of multiple table displays in columns mode is unavailing as a reason to back out the feature because it is unlikely that tables will be rendered with the same column widths, leading to another source of ambiguity.