Glossary
Anchor
Section titled “Anchor”One of nine screen-relative positions an immersive message can be pinned to. The enum values are TOP_LEFT, TOP_CENTER, TOP_RIGHT, MIDDLE_LEFT, MIDDLE, MIDDLE_RIGHT, BOTTOM_LEFT, BOTTOM_CENTER, and BOTTOM_RIGHT. An anchor combined with an x/y offset determines where a message appears on the HUD.
Attribute
Section titled “Attribute”A key=value or key:value pair on a markup tag, for example <wave speed=2> or <color value="#ff0000">. Attributes configure effect parameters and formatting properties.
Effect
Section titled “Effect”A per-character behavior attached to a span. Effects can change how individual glyphs are drawn: visual effects (rainbow, gradient, neon, outline), motion effects (wave, bounce, shake, wiggle, circle), animation effects (typewriter, obfuscate, fade), and others.
Effect category
Section titled “Effect category”A built-in grouping used by the config gating system to allow or disable whole classes of effects. The five categories are MOTION, COLOR, DISTORTION, SOUND, and OTHER.
Immersive message
Section titled “Immersive message”A HUD popup rendered directly to the overlay layer, separate from the normal component tree. It has its own duration, fade-in/fade-out tick counts, anchor, offset, text scale, background, and an optional list of message effects. Created via /eta send or ImmersiveMessage in Java.
Markup
Section titled “Markup”ETA’s tag language for inline styled and animated text. It has two syntaxes: <tag>...</tag> for per-character effects and formatting, and [tag] for message-level effects and attributes that only apply to immersive messages.
Message effect
Section titled “Message effect”A whole-message transform that applies to an immersive message as a unit, not to individual characters. Examples include spin, slam, slide, drift, rock, breathe, growshrink, float, vibrate, drip, shatter, and matrix. Message effects are not available in inline markup.
Preset
Section titled “Preset”A named bundle of effects and style properties defined in config. Invoking a preset by name in a tag applies all of its bundled effects and styles to the enclosed text in one step.
SDF font
Section titled “SDF font”A font rendered using signed distance field (SDF) data, which allows glyphs to scale to arbitrary sizes without aliasing. ETA bundles fonts in this format and supports SDF glyph providers across every supported Minecraft version.
A contiguous segment of text that shares a single style and effect list. Parsing any markup string produces an ordered list of spans. Each span carries its text content alongside color, formatting flags, font, effects, and any inline item or entity reference.