Rebel Text Preview 👁️

Some nodes output text, and ComfyUI is oddly bad at showing it to you. A CLIP encoder, a prompt builder, a captioner - you wire them up and the value just sits there, invisible unless you happen to look at a widget. Rebel Text Preview 👁️ fixes that with a glowing read-only text panel on the canvas: whatever STRING you feed it appears in a translucent terminal-style box so you can actually see what's flowing through your graph. It's the display-half of the pack's text nodes - Text Input types, this one shows.

How it works

Underneath, it's a display node with a passthrough. The Python side returns the incoming string right back out (so you can chain it - preview the text and keep using it downstream), and also pushes it to the UI. The JavaScript side builds a read-only <textarea> DOM widget on the node and fills it whenever the node executes, so the text you see is the value from the last run. The animated background draws behind it using the pack's usual onDrawBackground trick. One thing to note: the text input is forceInput - there's no editable box on this node, it's a pure display fed by a wire. If you want to type text, that's the Rebel Text Input node; this one only watches.

The inputs and output that matter

• text - the STRING to display, wired in from any text source.
• theme / color_scheme - the 12 animations and 14 palettes, for the backdrop.
• Output: STRING, a passthrough of the input so you can keep using the value downstream after seeing it.

Installing it

The whole pack installs in one step - there's no per-node setup:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/RealRebelAI/Rebels_Animated_Nodes.git

Restart ComfyUI, then hard refresh the browser (Ctrl + F5 / Cmd + Shift + R). The hard refresh is the part everyone forgets and the pack's README calls critical: ComfyUI caches the frontend JS, and without a forced reload the display widgets and animations won't load. No dependencies, no models to grab. You'll find it under Rebel AI → Prompts.

Where people get burned

• The preview stays blank after a run. The node only updates when it executes, so if its input didn't change, ComfyUI may cache it and skip re-running it - which is correct behavior, but looks like a frozen display. Change something upstream and run again, or just accept that it shows the last computed value.
• You try to type into the text area. Can't - it's read-only by design, and the input is wired-only. Use Text Input for editing.
• The animation is missing on Nodes 2.0. The pack renders on the legacy LiteGraph canvas; with ComfyUI's newer frontend enabled, the pretty background can fail to draw even though the text panel itself works.

If you build prompt templates, chain multiple text nodes, or debug workflows where a string gets mangled somewhere in the middle, this is a genuinely handy little window - it's the pack's text tool I'd actually reach for.