Text File History Loader

A convenience node with a narrow job: it remembers the text files you've opened with WAS's text loaders and lets you pick one back out of a dropdown instead of retyping the path. If you keep a few prompt files, a wildcards list, or a set of caption templates on disk and you're forever loading them, this saves you the file-picker dance.

It's the "recent files" menu of ComfyUI text nodes. Nothing fancier than that - but if you've ever fumbled to remember where you put my_prompts.txt, you get the appeal.

Why it exists

WAS Node Suite leans hard into text-file-driven workflows. Load Text File reads a file and can hand you back both its contents and a dictionary of its lines; the pack's prompt-from-file nodes pull lines sequentially or by index each run. Once you're doing that regularly, you accumulate a small library of text files, and pointing at them by full path every time gets old. The history loader keeps a list so you can reselect from the ones you've already used.

How it works

The pack records the text files opened through its loaders. This node reads that history and presents it as a selectable list; pick an entry and it loads that file's contents into the graph. There's one real quirk baked into the pack, and it's stated plainly in the WAS docs: it requires a restart to show files from your previous session. The history isn't live-refreshed mid-session for prior runs - so if a file you loaded last time isn't in the dropdown yet, restart ComfyUI and it'll show up. Annoying, known, documented.

The inputs and outputs that matter

• the history dropdown - the list of previously-opened text files. This is the control you use: pick the file you want.

The output is the file's text as a STRING (and, in keeping with the pack's other text loaders, it can expose the contents as a dictionary keyed by the file so you can pull individual lines). Wire the string into a prompt encoder, a find-and-replace node, or a concatenate step.

Installing it

Part of WAS Node Suite. ComfyUI Manager: search WAS Node Suite, install, restart. Manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/WASasquatch/was-node-suite-comfyui

install requirements.txt against your ComfyUI Python, restart.

Common issues

A file I loaded isn't in the list. Restart ComfyUI. The history only picks up prior-session files on startup - this is the documented limitation, not a bug you can fix.

The dropdown is empty. You haven't loaded any text files through the pack's loaders yet, so there's no history to show. Load one with Load Text File first, then this node has something to remember.

The node isn't there at all. That's the whole pack failing to import. WAS Node Suite is retired - unmaintained since late 2023 - and its dependency pins tend to break after a ComfyUI update, throwing "Import Failed" and pulling every WAS node with it. Reinstall the pack's requirements.txt against the correct ComfyUI venv (the bundled install.bat will find it) to bring them back.

Honest scope note: this is quality-of-life, not capability. It doesn't do anything Load Text File can't; it just saves you from retyping a path. If your workflow only ever touches one text file, skip it and load that file directly.