Show Text (MRLN)

The most underrated node in this pack is the boring one. Show Text (MRLN) displays any input as text inside the node and passes the STRING through. That's the entire job. No settings, no modes, no dependencies - which is exactly why you'll end up using it constantly.

In ComfyUI, most text that matters never gets looked at. A custom node emits a JSON string on some socket and you either wire it somewhere or you never see it. Show Text is the debug view: connect anything to value - the choices output of the Prompt Template node, the report output of LoRA Apply, the loras stack - and you can read exactly what's on that wire without digging through the console or trusting a guess.

How it works

The input is a * wildcard, so it accepts any type: strings show as-is, everything else is stringified, and dicts/lists come out as pretty JSON. The display is delivered server-side through the standard output-node ui channel, which means it works headless and in API runs - the in-node widget you see in the graph is a progressive enhancement on top. Because the value passes through as a plain STRING output, you can also drop it inline in a chain without breaking the flow, not just at the end of it.

That's the whole mechanism, and it's refreshingly thin. One input, one output, no surprises.

What it's for

Wire it to the Prompt Template's choices output and you can read which item every slot drew, on what seed - the "why did I get this" answer for a batch. Wire it to LoRA Apply's report and you can see applied strengths and any ⚠ MISMATCH warnings in the graph instead of the console. Wire it to the loras output and you can inspect the JSON stack a template drew. It's the node the rest of the pack's design assumes you have, and the shipped starter workflow (mrln-prompting) is built around exactly that pattern.

How to install it

It ships in the same pack as the other MRLN nodes, so the install note is shared: ComfyUI Manager can't find this pack yet - the registry flagged v0.1.1 on six severity: info pattern matches, so it's absent from Manager's search. That's a review hiccup, not a broken node. The manual install works today:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/master-merlin/comfyui-mrln-nodes ComfyUI-MRLN-Nodes

Restart ComfyUI. No extra Python dependencies - requirements.txt is deliberately empty, and this node uses nothing but the standard library.

Common issues

Honestly, there aren't any worth warning about - this is the "can't really break" node. Two things that aren't bugs: if the displayed text looks like raw JSON, that's a dict or list and pretty-JSON is what you asked for; and since it's an output node, if it's muted or bypassed it prints nothing and tells no one. Wire it, run, read. That's the whole troubleshooting guide.