(Impact-Pack) Multiline Wildcard Text

If you've used Impact Pack's wildcard system, you know the annoying part: it's a single-line text field, and to add a wildcard you either type the __filename__ syntax by hand or fight the node's own limited editor. This vsLinx node gives you a proper multiline text box plus a dropdown that lists your wildcard files and appends the one you pick straight into your text. It's a small quality-of-life upgrade, but once you've written a long prompt with a half-dozen wildcards in it, you'll feel the difference.

What it is and isn't

Let's be precise about the division of labor, because this is where people get confused. The node is just an editor and selector. It does not resolve wildcards - you won't see it swapping __character__ for an actual name. Resolution is Impact Pack's job, in its ImpactWildcardProcessor node. So the intended flow is: write your prompt here, wire the string output into the processor's "Populated Prompt" input, and let Impact do the substitution at runtime.

The dropdown is fed by Impact Pack's own wildcard API endpoint, which is why the pack is a hard requirement for the dropdown to have anything in it. Actually install-wise it's a soft one - the node registers whether or not Impact Pack is present - but without Impact Pack installed there are no wildcards to list and nothing downstream to resolve them, so it's pointless without it.

How to use it

• text (multiline STRING) - your prompt, with __wildcard__ syntax where you want substitution.
• Output string - whatever you typed, wired into ImpactWildcardProcessor's "Populated Prompt".

Select a wildcard from the dropdown and it's appended to the text. There was an early bug where the dropdown didn't reset after selection, making people think they could only add one wildcard per session - fixed in v1.8.1, so don't be shy about adding several.

It's also handy as a plain multiline prompt box even without wildcards - any workflow where you want more than the cramped single-line prompt widget and a text output to feed a sampler.

Install

It ships in the vsLinx pack, and needs Impact Pack alongside. Both are one click in ComfyUI Manager - search "ComfyUI vsLinx Nodes" and "ComfyUI Impact Pack". Manual, for the vsLinx side:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/vslinx/ComfyUI-vslinx-nodes.git comfyui-vslinx-nodes

Restart ComfyUI. If Impact Pack is missing you'll see the node but the dropdown will be empty - that's the tell.

The honest take

This is a "nice-to-have" node, not a must-install. If you already live in Impact Pack's wildcard world and write long, wildcard-heavy prompts, the multiline box and click-to-append dropdown genuinely improve the experience. If you use wildcards once a month, the built-in Impact wildcard field is fine and this adds nothing. The one thing to remember: it's the middleman in a three-node chain - this for editing, ImpactWildcardProcessor for resolving, your sampler for using - so if a wildcard "doesn't work", check the processor is actually wired up before blaming the text box.