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This output would be different from the ordinary ls -l -R output in that directories would not be listed individually with breaks between them.

Of course, if you don't have many thousands of files, and you just want a listing of everything, recursively (i.e., you don't need to filter or do something else with the found pathnames in find), you could just use ls:

$ ls -d -l **/* -rw------- 1 kk wheel 922 Jul 25 23:46 .viminfo -rw-r--r-- 1 kk wheel 0 Jul 19 23:39 .zshrc -rw-r--r-- 1 kk wheel 95 Jul 25 23:51 file drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 Jul 26 00:00 rootstuff -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 0 Jul 26 00:00 rootstuff/SECRET 

This relies on the ** globbing pattern being available, which it is by default in the zsh shell, and in bash if you use shopt -s globstar. It also relies on the shell matching hidden names. The zsh shell will do this if you set the GLOB_DOTS option with setopt GLOB_DOTS, and bash does it with shopt -s dotglob.

This would not work if your globbing pattern expands to a list so long that it generates an "Argument list too long" error.

Note that the ls command may well allocate widths for its columns dynamically based on the actual need whereas your find -printf command would have to use static widths, unless you run find twice to first compute the needed space for each column and then again to actually format the output (this is why the find -ls output is so wide, it does not use a two-pass approach and instead just gives each column ample space in the hope that everything will align somewhat nicely).