Manipulate floating splits or the scratchpad on the fly

Hi,

I use ion as my WM of choice, at home as well as at work. I use a
couple of workspaces, every one configured to perform a certain task,
or make this task easier.
One of these workspaces contains Xnest with a Citrix client running
Lotus Notes (Citrix is by far the whorst App to run on any Unix host
since it behaves like a window manager in every regard except for
displaying icons of its iconified windows).
Anyway, I'm using the scratchpad rather often on this workspace, it's
a tool that comes in handy when I receive a mail to create a new user,
for example. Open scratchpad, enter the commands in the terminal
contained in it, and everything is done without ever moving a window
or switching a workspace.
But: The location or the geometry of the scratchpad often hides some
information I need, so I found myself changing its size regularly. So
recently I tried floating splits instead of the scratchpad. It's not
that bad, but I need to use the mouse to move it around. And I
remembered how much I hate moving anything around the screen...
So, I would like to have some commands to manipulate either the
scratchpad or a floating split:
- making it (dis)appear
- resize and reposition it (to be a column on the right side of the
screen, or a row taking all screen width on the bottom half of the
screen, or even resizining it to scatchpads default size).

Thing is: I've no idea how to do this, and hope for your help.
Yes, I did take a look at lua, so I'm afraid to do some coding. I just
don't know what ion3 resources I need.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, as well as any configuration
that I could use as an example.

Regards
Christian Walther