Read Widget

Read Widget is the humblest node in the APZmedia Naming Tools pack, and the README is refreshingly honest about it: "It's humble. It does its job. It doesn't complain." One input called text (a STRING widget you type into), one STRING output, and the node literally returns the text unchanged. It is, by source-code standards, a straight wire with a widget on it.

So why does it exist? Two genuinely useful reasons, both about the shape of the ComfyUI graph rather than the text itself.

First, it's a string source that exists as a node. Some nodes in ComfyUI only take a text input if it comes from a node connection rather than a bare widget - the field isn't widget-addressable, or it's buried under collapsed UI, or a workflow template hardcodes a connection you're meant to provide. When you need a plain STRING on a wire and you don't want to build it out of concatenation nodes, Read Widget is a clean way to provide it.

Second, it fans a single string out to multiple consumers cleanly. Type a value once, and every node wired from the output reads the same string. In a naming pipeline, that's often a shared token - a project code, a shot number, a client ID - that several filename builders or hash nodes all need. Rather than typing it into three separate widgets (and risking three slightly different values), one Read Widget feeds them all, and you change it in one place.

The README's line about it "connecting things that would otherwise refuse to talk to each other" is the honest version of what a passthrough is for in ComfyUI: it's an adapter, not a transformer. It does exactly what a STRING output needs to be, and no more. You will not use this node every day, but it's the kind of thing that saves a workflow when some third-party node's text input demands a connection.

It's also a fair warning about the pack's scope: this is a naming-tools pack, and Read Widget is its concession to graph plumbing. If you're reaching for something this trivial, it means the rest of the pack earned its place.

Install

ComfyUI Manager → search "APZmedia Naming Tools". Or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/APZmedia/ComfyUI-APZmedia-cleanName-from-string
cd ComfyUI-APZmedia-cleanName-from-string
pip install -e .

Restart, find it under APZmedia. No dependencies beyond the pack's single tiny one, no model downloads - appropriately for a node that's basically return (text,).