I abandoned this project. Do not use it if you don’t want to maintain it.
The Imitator project was born when I realized, that my main automation project, Automations, depends on quite many external resources. For example, the Linux variant, xdo, depends on xdotool as well as other command-line tools being installed and au3 only works if you have AutoItX3 installed.
Therefore, I created Imitator. This library aims to support the same features as the Automations project, but just by using the C interface of the X server and Microsoft® Windows®. At this point, I’ve already managed to get the Linux part up and running, although it doesn’t offer all the capabilities xdo does. So, if you’ve problems installing xdotool or one of the other command line tools, try the imitator_x gem.
For now I just offer a gem for automating the X server, since although I found out how to use the Win32API to do Automation I wasn’t able to find out how I get the neccassary process privileges on Windows® Vista and later to finally run this functions. At the moment, the only way I know of is running the program with administrator rights. If you know how to do it better (at least it is possible, AutoIt doesn’t need admin rights!) just send an email to sutniuq@gmx@@net.
So far, have fun with the imitator_x gem.
There’s a known problem when generating the RDoc of imitator_x. During installation, RDoc may say something like “Imitator: Enclosing class or module not known” what means you missed the main part of the docs. I’m not sure in which order RDoc documents the files in the ext/ directory, but sometimes it seems that it doesn’t work out well. If you get that error, just regenerate the documentation with gem rdoc imitator_x --overwrite or, if you prefer the hanna RDoc template as I do, hanna --gems imitator_x.