IW StringNode

IW StringNode takes a piece of text and hands it back to you. That's the whole trick - the source is literally return (input,). No parsing, no defaults doing anything clever, no hidden format-string expansion. It's the unglamorous cousin of the built-in Primitive node, and it exists for one reason: it's always a plain STRING, and it stays one.

Why you'd reach for it

The Primitive node is type-flexible - it'll become a string, an int, a float, whatever the wire needs - which is great until it isn't. When you've got a workflow that keeps misreading a text field as a number, or when you're feeding a constant into a node that only accepts STRING, a node that is unambiguously a string ends the argument. It also doesn't touch dynamic prompts: whatever you type is delivered verbatim, with no {} substitution sneaking in. If you've ever had a prompt that printed literal braces you didn't write, you know why that matters.

It's also the clean way to hand one fixed value to several wires. Type it once, drag the output to five inputs, and you never worry about editing the same text in five places.

What you actually set

Just one input: input (multiline, default empty). Type your text, done. The single STRING output is what you wired it to. It's the least opinionated node in the pack, and that's its job - a stable anchor for text in a graph where everything else is doing something clever.

Installing it

This is part of iwanders/ComfyUI_nodes, a small personal utility pack by Ivor Wanders. It has no dependencies beyond Python's standard library and no model downloads - it can't be simpler to add:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/iwanders/ComfyUI_nodes

Then restart ComfyUI. Or, if you use ComfyUI Manager, search for iwanders in the Manager's "Custom Nodes" tab and hit Install - the manager panel knows this pack.

The one thing worth knowing

Nobody's written a love letter to a string-passthrough node, and that's fine. It's a "wow, I needed that specific shape" tool you grab after the third time a workflow loads with the wrong type on a wire. If you're already comfortable with the Primitive node and it's behaving, you don't need this one. But when you want text that stays text, no questions asked, this is the node to reach for - install once, forget it's there, be quietly grateful it is.