Text Holdup Cowboy

Every ComfyUI user eventually needs the same thing: wait, not yet. Text Holdup Cowboy is that, in node form. You feed it a text value, it holds onto it for a set number of seconds, then passes the text through unchanged. Flip enabled off and it passes straight through without pausing.

Why does this exist? The honest answer is timing coordination. Video helper pipelines, audio loading, external tooling that writes a file your workflow is about to read - sometimes a step needs a moment to finish before the next node reads its output, and ComfyUI won't wait on its own. A deliberate pause is the crude-but-reliable fix.

How it works

Three inputs, zero mystery:

• text - the value to pass through (and hold)
• timeout - seconds to wait before passing it through (default 120, min 5, max 3600)
• enabled - BOOLEAN, default true. Off = pass straight through without pausing.

One output: text, unchanged after the timeout elapses. That's the entire contract. The input and output share a name and a type, so it drops into a STRING wire like a segment of pipe.

The honest framing

Let's be direct about this: a hard sleep is the duct-tape solution to a coordination problem, and it's worth saying out loud so you don't over-use it. The failure mode is exactly what you'd expect - if the thing you're waiting for takes longer than timeout once, the node hands off too early and you're back to square one. It's a fixed-duration pause, not a "wait until X exists" gate.

Where it genuinely belongs:

• An upstream process (an API node, an external script) that needs N seconds to finalize before you read its file.
• Scripting out a demonstration or a staged render where the gap itself is the point.
• Buying time for a VRAM-heavy operation to finish unloading elsewhere in the graph.

Where it's a trap: using it to "fix" a race you haven't actually diagnosed. If your workflow fails intermittently, a 120-second blanket pause hides the symptom; the real fix is usually a proper ready-signal or a node that checks for the file's existence.

What else lives in this neighborhood

This is part of the TrentNodes pack's "Cowboy" naming theme (TextFileCowboy, VideoFolderCowboy, ImageFolderCowboy) - directory-iterator and file-loading nodes built around the same batch-pipeline idea. Text Holdup Cowboy is the odd one out in that it doesn't touch a directory; it's pure timing. It slots most naturally next to the pack's queue-oriented canvas tools, which are all about controlling when things run.

Install

One of ~69 nodes in TrentNodes:

# ComfyUI Manager: search "Trent Nodes"

# or:
cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/TrentHunter82/TrentNodes.git
cd TrentNodes && pip install -r requirements.txt

No dependencies worth mentioning. Real talk: you'll probably install this pack for Cut Detective or the H3 nodes and only remember this pause node exists when something downstream keeps reading an empty file. That's exactly when it earns its keep.