Hi, Joren.
Thanks for the good reply. I was not aware of rpshowall.sh. It's a bit more like exposé in the MacOS X world than what I want, but a really nice little script nonetheless. My usual case is a handful of terminals, a handful of emacs frames, and a handful of browser frames. So naming them isn't too helpful for me. (For example, what would I call them?) I'd also prefer to avoid the cognitive switch of thinking about window names when I can see the window. Right, so this might be possible, but I might have to do some extra work. I'll have to have a play, I'm quite fond of rp except for a couple details like this.
I've had a look through the other contrib scripts. The sloppy.c program is quite clever, actually.
I've noticed that scripting ratpoison seems a bit slow (e.g., rpshowall.sh). Maybe this is just the time X needs to move windows around, though that would sadden me given how quickly MacOS X (and the unity shell in ubuntu land) can do that trick. I do wonder if it's all the round trips to rp and if it couldn't be sped up by being able to pass rp many commands at once.