TEXT Key Control @ vrch.ai

If you've ever sat in front of ComfyUI rotating through prompt variations by hand-editing a CLIP Text Encode node, you know the friction: it's a copy-paste ritual, and it kills any sense of flow. TEXT Key Control from the ComfyUI Web Viewer pack replaces that ritual with one keypress. You store up to eight text options in the node, then tap an F-key to cycle through them while the graph runs. It's the keyboard version of "next preset," and it's the node I'd wire in first if you're doing live or semi-live generation with changing prompts.

How it works

The node holds eight text slots - text1 through text8, all multiline, so a whole prompt fits in each - and outputs the one you've currently selected as a STRING. Pressing your chosen shortcut_key (F1–F12, default F2) advances the selection and wraps around.

The settings that shape the behavior:

• skip_empty_option (default on) - jumps over empty slots when cycling. Leave it on unless you deliberately want blank slots as part of the rotation.
• current_value - which of the eight slots is active, shown in the node as Value: X.
• enable_auto_switch + auto_switch_delay_ms - cycles on a timer instead of on keypress. Set a delay in milliseconds and the node rotates prompts by itself. Handy for unattended flipbook-style runs, or a kiosk demo where you want variety without touching anything.

The STRING output feeds anything prompt-ish: a CLIP Text Encode, a text-concat node, a prompt router, even an LLM node's system message. Because this is the Web Viewer pack, you can chain the output into TEXT Concat OSC Control if you want to combine the selected preset with live tags later.

Installing it

This is one node in the full pack, so the install is the same everywhere:

1. In ComfyUI Manager, search for ComfyUI Web Viewer and install.
2. Manual route:

   cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
   git clone https://github.com/VrchStudio/comfyui-web-viewer
   pip install -r requirements.txt
   

   Windows portable: python_embeded\python.exe -m pip install -r ComfyUI\custom_nodes\comfyui-web-viewer\requirements.txt.
3. Restart ComfyUI.

Nothing to download model-wise. The requirements.txt drags in the optional Music2Emotion stack (librosa, pytorch_lightning, numba) even though you'll never touch it, so the first install just takes a while. Let it finish.

Where people get burned

Same rule as every keyboard node in this pack: the ComfyUI browser tab has to be focused for the key to register. Alt-tab to anything else and your F2 is dead. It's a known limitation - the pack's docs say so, and there's a reddit thread where someone hit it trying to use Web Viewer key input in the background. Plan around it: keep the viewer focused, or use the enable_auto_switch timer when you can't guarantee focus.

Two more notes. Browser shortcuts can steal your key - pick an F-key nothing else claims. And if you're cycling and the output doesn't seem to change, check current_value and make sure you actually populated the slot it lands on; an empty slot with skip_empty_option on just silently skips, which is correct behavior but easy to misread as a bug.

For a live A/B prompt comparison, this plus the pack's instant queue is the whole rig. One key, new prompt, new frame.