Derp Prompt Book

The Derp Prompt Book is a prompt library that lives on your canvas as a literal book: pages of prompts, organized into books you name, flip through, and edit in place. It's the pack's answer to the "I know I wrote that prompt somewhere" problem, and it's built around a multi-page editor with image embedding. Part of xcp_derp-UI (search "xcp_derp-UI" in ComfyUI Manager, by lordwedggie), under derpNodes/ControlDeck.

Why you'd want it

Prompt management is the quiet tax of ComfyUI. You've got the prompt that worked for that one portrait, the prompt that broke the faces, the prompt with the exact negative you spent an evening tuning - and they're scattered across text files, Reddit posts, and the metadata of images you half-remember. The Prompt Book consolidates them: create a book, add pages, and each page holds a prompt (with image embedding for reference shots). Flipping pages is faster than hunting through a folder, and the whole library is visible next to your workflow instead of hidden in a text editor.

The KB's prompt-engineering.md makes the case that good prompt discipline is mostly organization - knowing what you actually ran and what it produced. A prompt book is that discipline wearing a UI.

How it works

The node has no sockets and no outputs - it's a ControlDeck editor node, a pure virtual shell whose Python side does nothing. Everything lives in JavaScript: createDefaultDerpBook gives you a starting book, and from there the book/page model is yours - add pages, delete them, clean a page, save the book, create/rename/copy/delete whole books. There's a "Manage Pages" panel that opens as a floating Basta overlay (the pack's screen-space panel system), themed to match the node. Under the hood the book state persists to node properties, so your library survives workflow saves and reloads.

Image embedding is the feature that separates it from a plain text file: drop a reference image onto a page and the prompt travels with its visual context, which is exactly what you want when a page is "the one that produced this."

Install

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/lordwedggie/xcp_derp-UI-Release

Restart ComfyUI. No pip installs, no model downloads, no npm step - JS dependencies ship vendored. Manager users: search xcp_derp-UI.

Gotchas and honest notes

First, it's an editor, not a wire node - if you're expecting a STRING output to feed a CLIP Text Encode, that's not what this does. Its job is storing and organizing; you move the text you need out of it and into your prompt nodes. Second, because there are no sockets, the node can feel like it's "doing nothing" until you open it - that's by design.

And the usual derp-UI asterisk: this is a young, niche pack with essentially no third-party documentation. The bundled docs and the changelog are the reference, and they're actively maintained (the changelog documents a real stale-closure audit on the Prompt Book specifically). If a page doesn't save or a panel looks off, that history is worth reading - but also set expectations: this is the work of a small pack that's still finding its feet, not a decade-old library with a wiki.