Remote Boolean (GeN13)

Every workflow accumulates flags. Use the refiner, yes/no. Apply the detailer, yes/no. Upscale before saving, yes/no. Each of those is a BOOLEAN somewhere, usually in a Switch or a ControlNet gate, and each one is a widget you have to find when you want to flip it.

Remote Boolean (GeN13) turns them into one shared switch. Name the channel, put a clone wherever a boolean is needed, and toggling any clone toggles all of them.

Fields

• channel - the group name, default remote. Same type + same name = same group. A Remote Boolean on use_refiner is separate from a Remote Int on the same name, which saves you from a float quietly becoming "true".
• value - ON / OFF. The labels are literally ON and OFF rather than true/false, which reads better on a canvas than a checkbox ever will.

Output: BOOLEAN, the state the whole group shares.

Bypass and mute are shared too. That's the half people forget: burying one clone inside a subgraph and bypassing it takes the entire group with it, so you can kill a feature across a graph without hunting for every gate it touches.

Why booleans are the best case for this node

A boolean has two states, which means a wrong one is catastrophic rather than subtle. Forget to flip the "use upscaler" flag on one of three gates and you've rendered a 1024 image at 512 and upscaled nothing, and you'll notice four generations later. With one shared value, "did I turn it off everywhere?" has an unambiguous answer.

The second reason is placement. A flag belongs next to the thing it controls, not next to the widget it feeds. Remote Boolean lets you put the small ON/OFF at the top of a group with a note beside it, which is exactly where you'd want it if you were designing the UI yourself.

Third: it composes with the rest of the pack. The video and portrait example workflows in the Templates panel under ComfyUI-GeN13 (also in the repo's example_workflows folder) lean on Remote nodes for exactly this - one place for the settings that several stages agree on.

What to wire it into

Anything with a boolean socket: rgthree's Fast Groups Bypasser-style gates, a two-input switch's selector, a ControlNet enable, a "restore face" toggle. Also into the pack's own nodes where a BOOLEAN is an input - Degrease's enabled and Color Match Temporal's enabled are both bypass switches, so you can flip a whole processing stage off from one widget instead of right-clicking the node.

Installing

Manager → search GeN13 → install → restart. Manual:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/heigen13/ComfyUI-GeN13
pip install -r ComfyUI-GeN13/requirements.txt

requirements.txt contains just nvidia-ml-py, for the pack's monitor strip. This node is a frontend sync plus a three-line Python class that returns bool(value). No model files, no downloads. Portable build: python_embeded\python.exe -m pip.

Two things to keep straight

Channel name collisions are silent. Two unrelated flags both on the default remote are now one flag. Nothing warns you; the image just comes out with the wrong pipeline. Name channels after what they mean - use_refiner, do_upscale, detail_on.

It's a value, not a bypass. Remote Boolean synchronises a boolean that flows on a wire. It does not bypass the nodes it feeds - that's what the group's bypass does, and that's a different mechanism with a different effect (a bypassed node passes its input through when it can, or drops out of the prompt when it can't). Reach for the right one: the switch when you want a branch to choose, the group bypass when you want a stage gone entirely.

And the standing caveat for this family: a hidden wire is a hidden bug surface in a graph you'll debug at 2am. In a workflow with real branching, one switch is a gift. In a six-node graph, a checkbox is fine.