LC Show Text 🔤

Half of ComfyUI debugging is just looking at what a value actually is. When your prompt-builder stack outputs a string you can't see, or a pipe carries JSON you suspect is malformed, you either squint at the workflow or guess. LC Show Text is the "let me see it" node: it takes a string on a socket, displays it on the node itself, and passes the same string out the other side. Invisible data, made visible, with no disruption to your graph.

It's the LC123 version of the popular ShowText-style node, with a couple of thoughtful touches. It preserves newlines, so multi-line prompts stay readable instead of collapsing into one mush line. And if the string looks like JSON - starts with { or [, parses as a dict or list - it pretty-prints it with indentation. That last bit is a small gift if you're feeding the prompt-builder's JSON output into a regional builder and want to actually verify the structure.

How it works

It's an output node (is_output_node), so ComfyUI always runs it even if nothing downstream consumes the value - which is what you want from a debug display. The pass-through output returns a plain string, and the author specifically made sure of that: some downstream JSON consumers (Ideogram4, Krea2 Regional) call .strip() on the input and crash if they receive a list, so the node normalizes everything to a single string before passing it along. It also syncs the displayed value into the saved workflow, so the text you saw survives in the PNG metadata.

Inputs and outputs

• text - the STRING to display (socket input).
• Output: text - the same STRING, passed through.

Install

Part of LC123 - ComfyUI Manager (search "LC123") or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/lonecatone23/ComfyUI_LC123_nodes

Restart. No extra pip packages; MIT licensed. On cloud-hosted ComfyUI (RunningHub etc.), LC123 must be requested or run locally before the node resolves.

The take

Every serious workflow builder ends up with a text-display node in the kit - it's the cheapest debugging tool there is. This one is clean, keeps your JSON readable, and won't break downstream consumers. If you already run ShowText, you don't need to switch; if you don't, this is a fine first one.