Textbox w/ char count

The name is honest and it does exactly that: Textbox w/ char count is a multiline text input that shows a live character counter on the node. It makes no API calls, needs no API key, and has nothing to do with venice.ai technically - it just ships in the ComfyUI-Venice-API pack because the author needed one and figured everyone else might too.

Why you'd actually reach for it: Venice's API is picky about lengths. The image generation node caps prompts at 1500 characters, the TTS node caps input at 4096, and the enhance prompt has its own limit. When you're hand-editing long prompts it's maddening to guess whether you've crossed a limit - the counter turns guessing into reading a number. And since it's a plain pass-through text box, you can drop it anywhere you want a live length readout, Venice or not.

How it works

Under the hood it's the least impressive node in the pack: the Python side just echoes input_text straight to the text output. All the magic is in the frontend - a small JavaScript extension renders a "Character count: N" label at the top of the node and refreshes it every ~1.2 seconds as you type. It's polling-based rather than event-driven, which is fine for a counter; nobody needs per-keystroke precision on a character count.

One quirk worth knowing: that "Character count: N" widget is technically a button, and clicking it pops an alert with a joke in it. It's an easter egg, not a bug - feel free to click once, laugh, and never touch it again.

Inputs and output

• input_text - the multiline string you type. That's the whole input list.
• text - the same string, passed through unchanged, ready to wire into any string input on your graph (like a prompt field on the Venice image node, or a text node downstream).

Because it just forwards a string, it plays nicely mid-graph: you can put it before any node that takes text and get the character readout for free without changing the data flow.

Installing it

It's one of the seven nodes in the ComfyUI-Venice-API pack, so you get it alongside the actual API nodes. ComfyUI Manager (search "ComfyUI-Venice-API"), or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/DraconicDragon/ComfyUI-Venice-API.git
pip install -r ComfyUI-Venice-API/requirements.txt

Restart and it's there - search "CharCountTextBox" or look under the venice.ai category. The dependencies are light (requests, Pillow, numpy, configparser) and, unlike the rest of the pack, you don't even need a Venice API key to use this one. It's a small utility, but when you're squinting at a 1480-character prompt trying to remember the limit, it earns its place in the pack.