Load CLIP Name

Same family, same trick: this node shows you the exact dropdown a real CLIP loader would, and when you pick a file, it gives you back the filename as a STRING instead of actually loading anything into VRAM. No text encoding happens. It's a name-picker, not a loader.

Why you'd want a name instead of the real thing

"CLIP" is a slightly outdated label for what these dropdowns now hold. Through 2024 it meant the original OpenAI text encoder pairs (CLIP-L, OpenCLIP-G for SDXL). By 2026 most current models use a general-purpose LLM as the text encoder instead - Qwen3 variants, Mistral-based encoders, and so on - but ComfyUI's UI and file layout still call the slot "CLIP" out of habit. Point is: which exact file you have loaded genuinely changes your results, and people increasingly run different quantizations of the same encoder (fp8 vs a heavier Q8) to trade quality for VRAM. Knowing - and recording - exactly which one produced a given output is worth more than it used to be.

That's the practical use for this node: pick the encoder file from the real dropdown (so there's zero chance of a typo'd filename), then feed the resulting string into a comparison grid axis, a filename template, or a text overlay so your renders are self-documenting about which encoder made them. The pack's README frames this whole family of nodes as secondary helpers for building XY Plot comparison grids with qq-nodes-comfyui - this is exactly the kind of axis value that workflow wants.

How it works

The clip_name field is a dropdown populated dynamically from whatever files sit in your CLIP/text-encoder models folder - the same live scan ComfyUI's own CLIP loader uses, not a fixed built-in list like the sampler and scheduler versions of this node. Pick a file and the node converts the selection to text; nothing gets loaded into memory.

What to set, what it outputs

One field: clip_name, populated from your local models. The single output is a STRING - tooltip "The clip name" - ready to wire into anything downstream that wants the encoder identified as text.

Installing it

ComfyUI Manager: search ComfyUI-ReplenishNodes, install, restart. Or manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/hben35096/ComfyUI-ReplenishNodes

No model downloads for the node itself - it just reads filenames you already have.

Where people get tripped up

The dropdown starts empty until you actually have CLIP/text-encoder files in the right folder (ComfyUI/models/clip/ or wherever your extra_model_paths.yaml points), same as any file-based ComfyUI loader - drop the file in and restart or refresh if nothing shows up.

The bigger trap is the same one across this whole node family: the output is a plain string, not a loaded CLIP object, so it will not connect to a text-encode node's CLIP input. If your actual goal is to load and use a text encoder, you want the real CLIP Loader (or DualCLIPLoader for models with two encoders); this node is strictly for when you need the name somewhere else in the graph, not the encoder itself.