Show Text 显示文本 (2lab)

ComfyUI has a nasty habit of swallowing strings. You build a prompt from three concatenated nodes, you think it's right, and then the sampler does something weird and you can't see what actually reached it. ShowText (2lab) is the fix: a terminal node that displays the incoming string right in the node's UI widget, so you can read exactly what's flowing through. It's the ComfyUI equivalent of a debug print - except you don't have to dig through a console log to see it.

The name undersells it slightly, because the useful part isn't the display. The node also passes the text through as a STRING output, so you can drop it in the middle of a chain to peek at the value and keep the graph running in one wire. You get the readout without breaking your flow.

Inputs and outputs

• text - any string. The display shows whatever comes in.
• Output: text - the same string, passed through unchanged.

That pass-through is the whole trick. Most debug nodes dead-end a wire; this one keeps your graph intact while showing you the goods.

How it works

Nothing fancy under the hood: the node takes the input string, renders it in its widget on every execution, and echoes it to the output. When you're chaining transformations - a translation node feeding a tag expander feeding a CLIP text encoder - dropping one of these between stages shows you each intermediate value and makes the invisible visible. It's the single best way to catch a prompt that silently turned into an empty string.

Installing it

Part of comfyUI-tool-2lab, so install is standard. ComfyUI Manager → search "comfyUI-tool-2lab" → install, or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/AI2lab/comfyUI-tool-2lab

Restart ComfyUI. Pure Python, no models, no extra dependencies.

Gotchas

• It shows, it doesn't save. If you want the text written to a file so you can keep it past this run, chain it into SaveText (2lab) instead. ShowText is for your eyes only.
• Read the widget after the run. The displayed value updates when the node executes - if you're looking at it before a queue finishes, you're looking at stale text from the last run.
• Repo visibility, one more time. The pack's GitHub page currently returns 404, likely because the author made it private or moved it. Fresh installs can fail while existing setups keep working - worth knowing before you blame your own steps.