show text 显示文字

Text nodes are the least visible things in ComfyUI. An image node shows you its work on the canvas; a STRING node just sits there holding a value you can't see unless you hover. This node is the fix for that: feed it a string and it displays the text in the UI when the graph runs. One input, one output, nothing else - the entire product is "let me see what's actually in this wire."

You'll want it the first time an LLM node or a translator hands you text and you're not sure what came back. Chain a ChatGLM or Youdao node into show_text (2lab), hit run, and instead of guessing whether your prompt got mangled you just read the result on screen. It's the same move as the ShowText node in pythongosssss's custom-scripts pack, and for many people that's where the habit starts: put a display node at the end of any string chain you don't trust yet, then delete it when the chain behaves.

The mechanics:

• string in, string out. It's an output node, and it passes the value through untouched - so you can tap a wire mid-pipeline and keep the flow going to the sampler while also seeing what's in it. That pass-through is the feature. Many display nodes dead-end the string; this one doesn't, which makes it genuinely handy for debugging without rewiring anything.

Because it's marked as an output node, ComfyUI runs it and shows the text in a panel/UI area even if the string output isn't connected anywhere. That's the whole trick.

Honestly, this node is close to a built-in. Core ComfyUI's Show Text and the various display nodes in other packs do the same job, so you wouldn't install the pack for it. It earns its keep the same way the pack's other utility nodes do: when you've already got comfyUI-tool-2lab installed for its LLM or publish-to-WeChat features, a free eyeball on your strings is a nice-to-have that costs nothing.

Installing it

It ships in AI2lab/comfyUI-tool-2lab. ComfyUI Manager → search "comfyUI-tool-2lab" → install → restart. By hand:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/AI2lab/comfyUI-tool-2lab

Restart ComfyUI. The pack's requirements are light - qrcode, Pillow, numpy, torch - no model downloads.

Common issues

There's almost nothing to break here. The output is a display, so the common complaint is "I ran it and don't see the text" - that's usually because the graph didn't actually execute the node's branch, or you're looking at a cached run; re-run the queue and it shows up. If the text looks empty, the string feeding it is empty, so trace upstream. One thing to remember: since it's an output node, ComfyUI will consider the workflow done once the display runs, so if your sampler is further down the graph and only the display branch executes, you won't get an image - keep the sampler on a path that actually runs. As with the rest of this pack, documentation is a thin Chinese README and there's no English community writing about the node, so the behavior you see here is the extent of the docs.