How to send keyboard and mouse commands to the underlying operating system using Ruby?

Question

Is there an operating system neutral way for Ruby to send keyboard and mouse events to the underlying operating system?

One obvious (to me) approach is to use the Ruby/Java bindings and use java.awt.Robot, but that just seems silly.

Answer 1

For Mac:

$ sudo gem install rb-appscript

Then you can test it with a script like this:

require "rubygems"
require "appscript"
include Appscript

app("TextEdit").activate
app("System Events").keystroke("Look Ma, keystrokes!")

For Windows: (untested, borrowed from this thread)

require "win32ole"

wsh = WIN32OLE.new("WScript.Shell")
wsh.Run("Notepad.exe")
while not wsh.AppActivate("Notepad")
  sleep .1
end
wsh.SendKeys("Look Ma, keystrokes!")