👁️Show

ComfyUI has a stock way to look at a string mid-graph: Preview Any. It's fine, right up until it isn't - the preview doesn't stick around. Run your workflow, walk away, come back, and the box has emptied itself. If you're debugging a prompt that only misbehaves after several nodes of processing, a text display that forgets is almost worse than none.

Show is ComfyRage's answer: a passthrough text inspector that displays whatever string flows into it and keeps that text saved in the workflow. It doesn't alter the value - you can drop it into the middle of a chain without changing what reaches the encoder. It's the node you reach for when you want to know what text actually arrived at this point, hours later, without rerunning anything.

How it works

Show is genuinely passive. It takes the incoming string, shows it, and passes the same value out its STRING output - INPUT_IS_LIST is set, so it copes with list inputs gracefully and joins them for display if several arrive. The trick is the persistence: a small frontend extension renders the result as a read-only widget, and the value gets written back into the node's saved state inside the workflow JSON. That's the part Preview Any doesn't do. Since ComfyUI workflows are saved as JSON (and travel embedded in PNG metadata), the displayed text is part of the file - reload it or share it and the text is still there.

Inputs and outputs

• string (STRING, optional) - the text you want to inspect. There are no other inputs to fiddle with; the widget on the node is the read-only display that fills after a run.

Output is a single STRING, which is just the input passed through. That's the part people sometimes miss: Show is a tap, not a dead end. Wire it inline and the chain keeps flowing.

Installing it

Part of ComfyRage - a zero-dependency, public-domain pack. No models, no pip installs, nothing to hunt down. ComfyUI Manager → search ComfyRage → Install, restart. Or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/rakkarage/ComfyRage

Restart, and it's under the rage category.

Where it fits

The natural spot is after Pre (the same pack's prompt expander): Pre expands your {wildcards|} and comments into a final string, Show lets you read it before it hits the encoder - a great pairing for the "I want to see what I'm actually sending" workflow. It's also handy for verifying what a prompt refactor or subgraph actually produced, which is exactly the situation where random syntax silently stops expanding.

The honest caveat: this is a small utility, not a feature. If you only need a glance at a text value, Preview Any is right there and costs nothing to install. Show earns its place the moment "glance" isn't enough - when you need the text to persist, to survive a reload, or to travel inside a shared workflow file.