Show Text

This node does exactly one thing: take a string, show it on the node, pass it through unchanged. Sounds pointless until you've batched a hundred images from a randomized prompt and found one you like - at which point you'd sell a kidney to know which prompt produced it. Show Text is the inspection port for the Promptcraft pack, and it's there so you don't have to guess.

Why you'd reach for it

Random Prompts resolves {A|B|C} variants, __wildcard__ files, and ${var} variables into a different string on every run. That's great for variety and terrible for keeping track of what's real. Show Text sits between the resolver and the encoder and displays the resolved text directly on its own body - no popup, no console digging, no separate preview window. You glance at the node, you know exactly what went into this batch.

The other half of the trick: it's a pass-through, not a dead end. The same text it displays flows out the output, so it can sit mid-chain - Random Prompts → Show Text → CLIPTextEncode - without you having to break the wire to peek. That's the standard layout for this pack, and it's also how you'd chain any string around the graph while keeping it visible.

Inputs and output

It's deliberately thin, so this is the whole schema:

• text (STRING) - connection only, no text widget. Wire the Resolved Prompt output from Random Prompts into it. (The pack author's tooltip says exactly this: connect Random Prompts' output.)
• text (STRING) output - identical to the input, passed straight through.

The display itself is a read-only Preview widget added by the pack's front-end code - you can't edit it, which is the point: it's a mirror, not a target. The node also flags itself as an output node, so ComfyUI treats it as a legitimate terminal in the graph.

Installing it

It ships with the Promptcraft pack, so you get it by installing that:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/rTachibana/comfyui-promptcraft

Or search "Promptcraft" in ComfyUI Manager. No models, no extra dependencies, just a restart. One caveat that applies to the whole pack: it needs ComfyUI ≥ 0.18.0 because it's built on the V3 API - on an older install the node won't appear at all.

A small trap, and how it compares

Don't confuse Show Text with the pack's Debug node. Show Text just displays and passes through - if Random Prompts hits a syntax error, the workflow halts before Show Text ever shows anything. The Debug variant (PCRandomPromptsDebug) is the one that previews errors and keeps running.

Also be aware the resolved text is not saved with the image metadata automatically in a way that's easy to grep later - if you're building a dataset, keep your own log. For the 90% case of "what did this batch actually generate," Show Text is the fastest answer in the pack.