In Terminal on macOS, the ls (list directory contents) command sorts the output of its "all files" listing so that hidden files (those that begin with a dot) appear at the top of the list, like this:

$ ls -Alh
total 47640
-rw-r--r--@   1 robg  staff    28K Oct 26 15:00 .DS_Store
drwxrwxrwx@   5 robg  staff   160B Oct 23  2016 .TemporaryItems
... [trimmed for display]
drwxr-xr-x    8 robg  staff   256B Sep 19 08:31 .wine
drwx------   13 robg  staff   416B Apr 13  2019 Applications
drwx------+  20 robg  staff   640B Oct 26 12:36 Desktop
... [trimmed for display]

On the server that hosts my personal sites (as well as Many Tricks), however, ls doesn't sort the invisible files to the top:

$ ls -Alh
... [trimmed for display]
drwxr-x---.  4 rgriff mail     82 Oct 21 14:59 etc
drwxr-x---. 13 rgriff nobody  160 Oct 26 15:06 .htpasswds
-rw-------.  1 rgriff rgriff  503 Oct 20 21:02 .lastlogin
drwxr-x--x. 11 rgriff rgriff 4.0K Oct 21 17:48 mail
-rw-------.  1 rgriff rgriff    0 Oct 21 14:42 .mysql_history
... [trimmed for display]

I dug around for a solution, but didn't find one. So I came up with a really hacky alias, but it worked:

alias ls="/usr/bin/ls -la | egrep --color=never '[0-9]\ \.';ls -l | tail -n+2"

But really, don't use that. A buddy told me that the solution was a simple matter of changing a locale setting—and he was right. To make linux directory listings sort the dot files to the top, add this to your .bashrc or whatever config file you use:

export LC_COLLATE=C

With that locale value set, the ls output matches what I'm used to from macOS. I don't know much about locale at all, but this page explains it in detail, including this bit about the "C" locale:

The C locale, also known as the POSIX locale, is the POSIX system default locale for all POSIX-compliant systems.

I'm sure I could start there and dive into a deep hole learning about locales and default sort orders, but really, I don't care. I'm just happy that ls is once again sorting the way I prefer.