Simple Readable Metadata 🧾 Text Viewer-SG

You don't read ComfyUI metadata with your eyes often - usually you just want to grab the prompt, copy it, and get on with your life. The problem is that ComfyUI's built-in text display widgets are dumb: you get a box of text you have to select and copy by hand, and on long prompts that's genuinely annoying. This is the node that fixes it. Simple Readable Metadata 🧾 Text Viewer-SG is a text display with an actual editor UI bolted onto it - copy, search, filter, export, themes.

It's a simple passthrough under the hood. You feed it any STRING - usually the Simple_Readable_Metadata output from this pack's metadata node - and it shows the text in a big scrollable viewer. Whatever goes in comes back out its text output unchanged, so you can drop it in the middle of a chain without breaking anything. The magic is entirely in the widget, which the README lists out:

• Copy Positive - copies the positive prompt in one click, no selecting needed. The author added this after it annoyed him personally, and it's the button you'll actually use.
• Select all, copy all or selected, delete all, paste text
• Search / highlight words and filter lines containing a word
• Export the viewed text to file and a pretty JSON toggle for raw metadata
• Day/night theme and text wrapping toggles

Recovering prompts from stubborn old images

The viewer has a second, sneakier job. When a CLIP Text Encode node's text box has a wire connected to it, ComfyUI stores the link instead of the literal prompt, so the embedded metadata comes back as "(empty)". The viewer's "show all text in workflow" feature dumps every text field embedded in the workflow of an already-generated image, so you can hunt down the actual prompt even when the metadata node can't find it. It's a hack, but a useful one - it's the only way to recover those prompts short of opening the JSON by hand.

One input, one gotcha

Just text (STRING), and one text output. Nothing to tune, which is the point.

The gotcha is in the README in bold: text you paste into the viewer WILL be overwritten if an input node is connected. The viewer is not a text editor that happens to display metadata - when a wire feeds it, the wire is the source of truth. If you want to paste something and keep it, disconnect the input first, then paste.

Installing

It's part of the Simple Readable Metadata pack, so it installs with everything else:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/ShammiG/ComfyUI-Simple_Readable_Metadata-SG.git
cd ComfyUI-Simple_Readable_Metadata-SG
pip install -r requirements.txt

Easier: Manager → Custom Nodes Manager, search Simple Readable Metadata-SG, install, restart. The pack needs nothing but opencv-python and brings no model files - the text viewer itself is pure UI code, so the install is trivial.

If it's not showing text

Same pack-wide watch item as the rest: on ComfyUI 0.3.76+, flip Node 2.0 OFF or the frontend rewrite breaks this node's display. And when you use Copy Positive, the README's advice is worth repeating - "make sure to verify the final copied text" - because the prompt it copies is whatever the workflow stored, and if that was the empty-input bug, there may be nothing there to copy.