Show Text (UniMeta)

ComfyUI is surprisingly bad at showing you strings. Most nodes that output text just hand it to the next node and you never see it; the ones that display it are bolted onto other packs. Show Text (UniMeta) is this pack's answer: a tiny, no-frills node that takes any string and shows it on the canvas as a widget - and passes the same string through as an output you can keep wiring.

It's a local variant of pythongosssss's famous Show Text 🐍 from ComfyUI-Custom-Scripts (MIT-licensed, credited in the README). Nothing fancy, no conversion magic: string in, string out, human-readable display in between. In the context of this pack it exists mostly as a debug companion - the README's own workflows wire it up to eyeball outputs like the scanner's diff_report or the force-include list.

The inputs and output

• text - the STRING to display. The tooltip even gives the intended use: "Connect the Metadata Force Include string output to view forced classes." One wire, done.
• Output: a single STRING (list type, so it plays nice with batch text handling). Because it's an output node, it always runs and its widget shows the last value it received.

It's dead simple by design, and that's the point. When you're debugging "why isn't my custom node's output what I expected," a display node with zero configuration is the thing you reach for.

Where it fits in this pack

Three places you'll actually use it:

1. Auditing forced classes - Metadata Force Include's forced_classes_str → Show Text (UniMeta) to see exactly which node classes you've forced, before you trust a scan.
2. Reading the scanner - wire Metadata Rule Scanner's diff_report or suggested_rules_json into it. The JSON gets long, but for a quick glance at whether the scan found what you wanted, it's unbeatable.
3. Any other string in your graph - from Save Custom Metadata Rules' status to Show generated_user_rules.py's file contents. Any text output in the pack becomes visible with one connection.

A couple of honest caveats. For large outputs - like a full rules JSON or the entire generated_user_rules.py - a canvas widget is not a text editor; it's fine for inspection but clunky for editing. And unlike some text nodes, this one doesn't format or truncate - what you wire in is what you see. If you need to convert a number or a weird type into text first, that's what the pack's other utility node, Show Any (Any to String), is for. This one just shows text, and it does that one job perfectly.