The AutoHotkey version of Makro is *public*
Published July 30, 2026
Makro started in 2016 as an AutoHotkey script, compiled to an exe, running on one Windows machine. That version does not survive. What survives is the second one, and as of this week its source is public: github.com/TechHQUSA/makro-legacy-v2.
It died twice before it became this
The AutoHotkey line died for two unrelated reasons.
First, corporate IT started blocking AutoHotkey outright. Enough malware was shipping as compiled AHK executables that the format itself got treated as a threat, regardless of what the script inside actually did.
Second, the machine changed. Moving to Linux and then a Mac meant AHK did not exist as an option at all, not blocked, just absent.
The browser was the one surface that survived both. That is the entire reason this is a Chrome, Edge and Firefox extension today, not a design decision made in the abstract.
What is actually in the old repo
129 commits, spanning 2017 to 2022. The earliest one that survives is dated 2017-09-15, a bare license file. Real source starts with a commit called "Rough draft .2" three months later.
Before pushing it anywhere, it went through a cleanup pass:
- Two live API keys that had been committed to history were found and confirmed dead.
- An entire feature (an IP-lookup tool bundled into an early build) was removed, history and all, because it carried real test data and a compiled binary.
- Every commit author was rewritten to a single pseudonymous identity. The old repo had a real name and a personal email address sitting in plain text in every commit.
None of that touched the commit dates or the commit messages describing what changed. The history is real. The identity attached to it is not.
Why this instead of staying quiet
The importer in the current extension still reads AutoHotkey macro folders. That was not planned as a tribute. It is there because the first library it ever had to import was the author's own, from the tool this grew out of. Publishing the source makes that claim checkable instead of just asserted.
It also means the "started in 2016" line in Makro's own materials now points at something instead of resting on memory.
What did not change
The current extension is unrelated code. Nothing from the AutoHotkey version runs inside it, encrypted or otherwise. Cloud sync in the current product uses AES-256-GCM with a key derived through PBKDF2-SHA256 at 600,000 iterations, zero-knowledge, the server holds ciphertext only. That has nothing to do with the AutoHotkey tool and predates none of it. The old repo is history, published as history.