BD Load Text

BD Load Text is exactly as boring as it sounds: you give it a file path, it reads the file and hands you the contents as a STRING. It's one of the little plumbing nodes in the BrainDead pack's Cache family, and boring is the point - this is the kind of node you drop in once, forget about, and quietly curse the months you spent without it.

Here's why it exists. ComfyUI is 70% plumbing, and a huge chunk of that plumbing is just "get a value from somewhere and wire it in." Most text in ComfyUI lives in widget boxes you type into. If you want a shared prompt, a list of LoRA names, a batch of negative terms, or anything you already maintain as a file on disk, you have two options: retype it everywhere, or read it from disk once. That second option is this node. Wire a STRING path into file_path, and the text output feeds straight into your text-encode node, prompt iterator, or any STRING input you've converted to a socket.

The mechanism could not be simpler - it's a plain UTF-8 file read with a sanity check. If the path doesn't exist or can't be opened, text comes back empty and the status output tells you exactly what went wrong (File not found: <path>), so a broken loader announces itself instead of silently injecting nothing into your workflow. It also means there's nothing to tune and nothing to break; it's about as deterministic as a node gets.

Where it shines in this pack specifically is pairing with the save-context system. BD Get Context Path and BD Save File resolve path templates for you - and once you have a resolved path as a STRING, you can feed it right back into BD Load Text to read whatever was written there. That round-trip (save something, load it back, feed it downstream) is the pattern behind a lot of the caching workflows in this pack, and this is the load half of it.

Installing

Installation is the same for every node in this pack, and it's covered in the pack README:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/BizaNator/ComfyUI-BrainDead
cd ComfyUI-BrainDead
pip install -r requirements.txt

or just search "BrainDead" in ComfyUI Manager and hit install. Either way, restart ComfyUI and you'll find the nodes under the 🧠BrainDead category. Worth knowing up front for the whole pack: every BrainDead node is built on ComfyUI's V3 API, so if the pack won't load or the nodes are missing, your ComfyUI install is too old - update ComfyUI itself first.

Gotchas

Two things bite people. First, the path is a plain string, not a file picker - there's no browser widget here, so you need an absolute path (or one ComfyUI can resolve from its working directory), and a relative path that's wrong in just one folder level gives you the empty text + status message above. Second, this node reads on every execution. That's usually what you want (you changed the file, it picks it up), but if you're reading a big file in a tight loop, remember ComfyUI caches aggressively and only re-runs this when an upstream input changes - which, for a file loader, means "never" unless you rerun the queue. If you genuinely need to force a reload each run, change the seed or force a re-queue; that's a ComfyUI-wide quirk, not this node's fault.

It's a 60-second node that saves you from a lifetime of retyping prompts into six different widgets. Add it next to your prompt files and move on.