Control Arduino IDE 1.5.8 with command line

My workbench for Arduino development does not have enough space for a high power PC so I use lower power Arm devices (Raspberry Pi, Banana Pi, and Yun Shield) instead. However, Arduino IDE 1.5.x is not well supported yet (Raspbery Pi has a working version but not the other two, which I prefer. UPDATE: I figured it out.), and several Makefile solutions are still buggy against 1.5.x's libraries.

My temporary solution is to outsource the compiling to the more powerful machine (my i7-4770 running Arch 64 finishes compilation almost instantly, as opposed to 40 seconds on Raspberry Pi), and grab the compiled *.hex file back to these Arm devices to upload to Arduino via the USB serial connection.

As of October 4, 2014, Arduino IDE 1.5.8 has a buggy command line parameter passing, so I cannot compile the code remotely without doing a remote X session, and I want to avoid having to run an X server on these Arm devices (although Banana Pi actually runs X quite well). Therefore, I use the following hack to trigger the compiling via the command line.

$ DISPLAY=:0 xdotool search --name "Arduino 1.5.8" windowactivate --sync windowfocus mousemove --window %1 10 30 click 1

xdotool searches for a window whose title contains "Arduino 1.5.8", activates the virtual desktop it's on, focuses on the window, moves the mouse cursor to coordinates (10,30) relative to the application window (where the "Verify/Compile" button is) and then clickes on it to trigger the compilation.

For some reason sending ctrl+r doesn't work for me. If anyone knows why, I'd love to know.

$ # this doesn't work
$ DISPLAY=:0 xdotool search --name "Arduino 1.5.8" windowactivate --sync windowfocus key ctrl+r