Merge Text Lists (DEPRECATED)

Merge Text Lists (MergeTextLists) is a node with a name that sounds like everyday plumbing and a reality that's more niche: it's a legacy piece of ComfyUI's dataset/batch tooling for merging lists of texts, marked deprecated because the newer Create List node took over the job. If you're reading this after a workflow complained about it, you probably don't actually need this specific node - but knowing what it was saves you a confused hour.

The source is candid about its fate: "superseded by the Create List node," with a deprecation flag on the class. It's still loaded so old graphs don't break, but it's not a building block anyone should be adding fresh.

How it works

The interesting detail is that Merge Text Lists is a group-process node in the dataset family - it receives the texts input as a list (multiple connected inputs get concatenated into one list by the input machinery) and passes the merged list through. The implementation literally just returns the list it was handed, logging how many texts made it in. So in practice this node isn't doing much transformation at all: its whole value was that it accepted multiple text-list inputs and presented them as a single merged list to whatever came next.

The schema-facing interface is minimal: one texts input ("List of texts to process"), one texts output ("Processed texts"). No merge options, no delimiter, no dedupe. It was never a general-purpose text joiner - that was always Concatenate Text's job. This node was about list identity in the batch pipeline.

What to use instead

For combining strings, the current tools are the same ones that replaced all the deprecated text nodes: Concatenate Text (StringConcatenate) for two strings with an explicit delimiter, Format Text (StringFormat) for templated multi-part joins. For the actual list-merge use case - combining multiple lists of prompts or captions into one - the replacement named in the source is Create List (the core list utility node), which is where batch/list assembly lives in modern ComfyUI.

Common issues

The main trap is assuming this node merges strings into one string. It doesn't - it merges lists, and the schema's STRING typing hides the list behavior. If you connected two prompts expecting "hello world" and got a list back, that's the mismatch. Second: it's deprecated, so it's not where core invests; a graph that depends on it should migrate to Create List (or to Concatenate Text if the real goal was joining strings). There's no hidden capability to preserve here - deprecation plus a no-op implementation is about as close as a node gets to "just remove me."