ZF Multi Text Switch

Every serious ComfyUI workflow eventually needs "I have four different positive prompts and I want to flip between them with one click." The built-in answer is a primitive value node per prompt and a lot of rewiring. ZFMultiTextSwitch (display name "ZF Multi Text Switch") is the clean version: one node, up to 32 text routes, one button per route, and a single text output that carries whichever route you selected.

It's part of ZF-ComfyUI-Helper, the no-dependency utility pack, and it lives under ZF Helper/Text.

How it behaves - and the design choices that matter

Two inputs drive everything:

• input_count - how many text inputs to show (1–32, default 4).
• selected - which route is active. The route buttons in the node's UI set this for you, so you mostly never touch the number directly.

The interesting part is how it routes. Unlike a first-non-null switch (rgthree's Any Switch walks inputs and picks the first non-empty one), this is an explicit A/B-style selector with lazy evaluation: only the selected route is actually executed. The node tells ComfyUI which upstream input it needs and the others don't run at all - which means you can hang expensive upstream text-processing on unselected routes without paying for them.

There is deliberately no content-based fallback. Select route 2 and route 2 is empty, you get an empty string, not a silent "let me try route 1 anyway." That's a feature if you've ever been burned by a switch guessing wrong; it's a gotcha if you assumed graceful fallback. The one special case is the dedicated Empty Text button: selecting it outputs "" with route index 0, which is the explicit "intentionally empty" route.

Outputs

Two, both useful: text (the selected route's string) and selected_index (an INT reporting which route was picked - handy if you're logging or driving other logic off the selection). Wire text into a CLIP Text Encode, a save node, or anywhere else a string goes.

Installing it

Same trivial install as the rest of the pack - no dependencies at all:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/Z-yaofang/ZF-ComfyUI-Helper

Restart ComfyUI, or install via ComfyUI Manager by searching ZF-ComfyUI-Helper. No models, no requirements.txt.

Where people trip

• Thinking it falls back. It doesn't, and that's documented. If a route looks empty when you expected content, check that you connected that specific route, not that the node is being helpful. Unconnected or empty routes output "".
• The selected field going out of sync with input_count. If you drop input_count below the route you had selected, the node clamps to the visible range - you won't error, but you may silently be on a different route than you think.
• Expecting one output per route. It's one text output that mirrors the selection, not 32 parallel outputs. That's the point, but it surprises people coming from "one node per prompt."

The lazy-evaluation detail is the reason to reach for this over a home-built pile of Primitive nodes: when you scale to 8–16 prompts with heavy conditioning upstream, "only run what's selected" stops being a nicety and starts being the difference between a snappy workflow and one that recomputes everything every run.