AHK++ will go into maintenance mode on January 1, 2027

[mark-wiemer]

Hi all, it's 2025-12-30 and I haven't written a PR for AHK++ in a lot of months. I am healthier now, but very busy, and using Linux full time. As such, there hasn't been any reason for me to use AHK++, and it's been hard to test potential fixes. I do plan to upgrade my PC and get a Windows VM setup on my new machine (I've already set aside a budget and experimented with QEMU), but I don't see Windows ever becoming my main operating system again.

That said, I appreciate that this extension remains the only comprehensive v1 + v2 VS Code extension (that I know of), and I will spend some time in 2026 reviewing the open issues and prioritizing high ROI ones when I have time. I still love coding for VS Code extensions, formatters, and lexers, so rest assured I'm also doing this out of passion, not just a sense of obligation. I've decided a 1-year notice should be sufficient for folks to plan forks or other migration strategies.

In 2027, I'll pause any new feature work, and only work on critical security issues or weird major bugs that new versions of VS Code (or other supported IDEs) might introduce. I'll still monitor notifications and respond as needed.

See also the the same announcement on AHK Community. Thanks as always for all your patience and support, this continues to be a very fun project to work on (or at least, think about!)

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2026-01-14: Clarify that discussion on both GitHub and AHK Community are OK

[fade2gray]

End of an era. Good luck for the future. 👍

[ewerybody]

Oh dang! You too! :D
I'm also looking into moving to Linux but actually I miss AHK a whole damn lot!
How do you overcome that? And ... There are some AHK similar projects for Linux as well, right? Found something fitting yet?

[mark-wiemer]

Haha, to be completely honest, I never started using AHK. I sat down in November 2020 to start writing my first AHK script from scratch, opened VS Code, and saw that the best extension had just been deprecated. So I started maintaining my own version. Only ever wrote a few AHK scripts. If I were to get into desktop automation today, I'd probably look into libraries in languages I'm familiar with, like JavaScript, Python, or C#. And yeah, I'm sure there's great desktop automation available for Linux, but I haven't looked around.