Glossary
Macro Handler Glossary
Concise canonical definitions of the terms you meet across product, runtime, Lua API, visual builder, and detection surfaces. A quick-reference for new users.
Product
- Macro
- A unit of automation that runs on Macro Handler. Can be a chain of visual blocks, a Lua script, or a mix of the two.
- Overlay
- A minimal floating panel that runs on top of other apps and exposes start/stop controls for the active macro. Requires Display Over Other Apps permission.
- Visual Builder
- The no-code macro authoring surface. Lets you build a macro as a chain of blocks across 62 block types.
Runtime
- Cutover
- The state where the Lua 5.4.8 native runtime has passed all acceptance gates required to become the production default.
- Lua 5.4.8 Native Runtime
- The new native Lua interpreter that will run via JNI. Remains experimental until the cutover gate passes; the 500+ API claim applies to the default launch runtime.
- LuAJ
- Macro Handler's default launch Lua runtime. A Java-based, sandboxed interpreter that follows the Lua 5.2 syntax baseline.
- Sandbox
- The security layer that restricts system calls while a Lua script runs. Calls such as require, loadstring, debug, and os.execute are blocked.
See: Lua Reference > Sandbox scope
Lua API
- Asset
- A registered resource (image, text, color) used as a target in region scans. Invoked as Asset.image("name").
- FindParam
- A parameter builder for Region searches. Lets you tune method, scale, case sensitivity, mode, and similar fields.
- Hud
- An on-screen display panel. Use Hud:show("text") to surface live information to the user while the macro runs.
- mScore
- Match score (0-1). 1.0 is a perfect match; in practice the 0.85-0.98 range is considered reliable.
- pcall
- Lua's "protected call". Runs a function and, if it raises, returns an (ok, result/err) tuple instead of stopping the script. The standard error-handling pattern in production macros.
- quickTap
- A shortcut function for a single tap. Usually called as quickTap(point) or quickTap(region:find(...)).
- Region
- The screen area to scan. Defined with Region(x, y, w, h) or Region() with no args to use the whole screen.
- Snap
- The singleton that captures a screenshot and feeds subsequent Region scans. Manually refreshed via Snap.screenRefresh().
Visual Builder
- Block
- A visual card that represents one action in the Visual Builder. Macro Handler ships 62 block types across the search, action, flow, system, touch, data, and advanced categories.
- Breakpoint
- Pauses the macro at a specific block when Debug Mode is enabled in the Visual Builder. Stays saved but does not trigger when Debug Mode is off.
- Inline Expression
- A small expression written inside a block parameter using the {{var}} syntax. Supports variable reads + basic math only; constrained by the sandbox.
Detection
- Color Cluster
- A check for whether a region contains enough pixels (a cluster) of a target color. Ideal for UI state detection.
- ML Kit
- Google's on-device machine-learning library. Used in Macro Handler for Latin, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Devanagari OCR families. Requires Google Play Services.
- OCR
- Optical Character Recognition. Reads text from the screen. Macro Handler uses ML Kit (Latin/Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Devanagari) + Tesseract (Arabic, Cyrillic).
- Template Match
- Searching for a small image "template" inside a larger region. Uses OpenCV TM_CCOEFF_NORMED + NEON SIMD + DPI scaling.
- Tesseract
- An open-source OCR engine. Ships in Macro Handler with Arabic and Cyrillic traineddata for those OCR families.