Show Text 🆎

Show Text 🆎 prints whatever STRING it receives on the node face and then hands it right back to the next node. That second half is the whole point. A typical text preview is a dead end - you drop it at the end of a wire and whatever was flowing stops there, forcing you to split the wire if you still need the value. This one lets you inspect mid-graph: an LLM reply, a generated caption, a resolved filename, anything text-shaped, rendered right on the node with the value passing through unchanged.

It earns its keep in the LLM-in-ComfyUI corner of workflows. When a chat node returns a reply you want to eyeball before conditioning on it, or a captioning model writes a caption you want to sanity-check before it feeds a save node, this is the gap in the graph. The shown text is selectable, so you can copy a prompt or a caption straight off the canvas without hunting for the log.

How it works

One text input (STRING, marked forceInput - you have to wire something in, there's no widget to type into) and one text output that returns the original value untouched. Behind the scenes it's an output node, so it always runs and its rendered text is delivered to the frontend as a UI payload - that's what draws the string on the face - while the real result stays the exact value you passed in. What you see is str() of the value; for a normal string that's identical to the input.

Because it's an output node, it also behaves like one in the graph: ComfyUI's cache works backward from output nodes, so this node firing forces its upstream to execute. That's usually what you want when you're debugging, but if you're dropping it onto a hot path just to snoop, know that it costs a bit of the cache.

Install

ComfyUI Manager is the easy route: search for ComfyUI-AusBoss under Custom Nodes and hit Install, then restart. Or manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/ausboss/ComfyUI-AusBoss.git

Restart ComfyUI and Show Text 🆎 sits under 🆎 AusBoss/Utility. No extra Python dependencies. Minimum ComfyUI 0.27.1 (Manager enforces it), and hard-refresh with Ctrl+Shift+R after frontend updates.

Common issues

Two things to keep straight. First, it only displays strings - the input type is STRING, so if your node emits something else, convert it before it gets here. Second, it's an output node, so it shows up in the run and keeps its upstream honest; if you don't want that, this is the wrong node for casual peeking. If you do want the string to keep flowing to other consumers while it's displayed, that's exactly what the pass-through output is for - split the wire off text and carry on.