Pretty neat thing you've done with ranger there :D. Even though it still asks for a path with ;s for me (and then opens with ranger). Since writing the post I have also discovered the amazing urxvt-perls which allow you to enter screen like (but better) browsing of the console log trough which you can easily find and yank text into your buffer. Moreover it provides for a quick way to open links with the keyobard, which would otherwise have to be done with the mouse.
Even with "cd ~/Downloads" in my .pentadactylrc, ;s saves to ~/ by default for me, but you can just provide a name, and it will work (original location doesn't really matter if you're just going to move it).
One problem I've had is saving something with spaces or special characters in the name. You have to put "<file>" instead of <file> to get pentadactyl to send the file location as an argument correctly. --selectfile will work with spaces and such as long as there are " " around the location, but this wouldn't work for me in the script. I tried that, escaping everything, and renaming the file to remove special characters and convert spaces to underscore. All three work fine when when I copy the variable used for --selectfile= to the clipboard and then test it in the terminal, but none of them actually work in the script, so I have to fix that. I've also just started having a glitch where the autocommand is executed for every open firefox window (3 windows = 3 ranger instances) which I'm 90% sure wasn't happening before.
I've recently switched from urxvt to termite. It has a lot of the features of perl scripts built in by default (url hinting, scrollback/copy mode, etc.). Sadly, you can't yet change keybinds with the config file, but I've rebound prefix-f to do url hinting with tmux and bound it to f in zsh and weechat (using vimode.py.. vim-mode would be the irssi equivalent I believe) using xdotool to send the url hint key combo. The scrollback copy modes for termite, urxvt, dvtm, etc. are all pretty decent, but I've found tmux's to be the best in terms of functionality and rebinding, though termite's mode handles columnar stuff better imho.