ScarlotSoft Text Preview

ScarlotSoft Text Preview is a debugging node for your strings: plug any wire into source, run the workflow, and it shows you the text in a readout on the node. That's the whole deal - it converts whatever comes in to a string and displays it, so you can see what a tagger produced, what a prompt builder assembled, or what a concat node actually joined before it hits the text encoder and silently shapes your image.

It's an output node with no outputs - source goes in, nothing comes out. It exists purely to be watched. That's why it's an output node in the execution sense too: output nodes always run and the cache works backward from them (the plumbing doc in the KB goes into why that matters). Drop it at the end of a text branch you're suspicious about, and it forces that branch to actually execute so you can inspect the result. It's the text-world equivalent of a Preview Image node - swap one in while you debug, take it out when you're done.

Two inputs to know:

• source (required, any type) - the string you want to eyeball. Anything wired in gets str()-converted, so numbers and other types display as their string form.
• string_a (optional) - a multiline text field on the node. The JS removes it as a socket and keeps it as a widget, so you can type a reference string for comparison, or use it as a fallback when nothing is connected.

The one ScarlotSoft flourish is a small counter in the corner labeled "Tokens" - though it's really counting words (it splits on spaces and commas). Don't trust it as a token count for T5 or CLIP if you're budgeting prompt length; it's a rough length gauge, and the label oversells it.

Install

Same as the rest of the suite. ComfyUI Manager → search "ScarlotSoft" → install → restart, or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/scarlotsoft/ComfyUI_ScarlotSoft

Restart. Zero dependencies.

The honest take

Core ComfyUI ships a ShowText node and there are prettier text viewers out there, so on pure capability this is a clone. What it adds is placement in the suite - the dark theme, the always-runs behavior, the word counter - and honestly, for most debugging you could get the same from core. The real tip here isn't about this node at all: get comfortable looking at intermediate text in ComfyUI, because a prompt that looks right in your head is frequently wrong by the time it's been through three concatenations. This node is a perfectly good window for that. Just read the word count as "words," not tokens.