Screen output

Is it possible to split the screen and show, lets say a local directory listing on the left and a remote directory listing on the right with shell scripting?

I know it's usually done with curses/ncurses, but I'd really like to keep it simple as possible. I guess 'dialog' command could do it also.

See the screen-funcs library from chapter 12 of my book, Shell Scripting Recipes.

There are a number of functions for printing to blocks of the screen.

The scripts are all available in a tarball at http://cfaj.freeshell.org/shell/ssr/ssr-scripts.tar.gz.