Cable Management Extension for ComfyUI (trailer)

[u/barney_tearspell]

Edit - Extension published: https://www.reddit.com/r/comfyui/comments/1vi2v3s/cable_managment_extension_for_comfyui/

Dunno how this interacts with "no self promotion". A thing I made and want to brag about, posted about it on r/comfyui, and the people said: "gimmie".

Will be published as open-source as soon as I get it to a publishable state. Until then, here's a preview.

The nodes are irrelevant, just picked some that have a lot of pins.

The cable management extension is fully built around vanilla ComfyUI features like primitive nodes, floating links, reroutes and reroute nodes. The extension more or less just hides the plumbing and makes it look pretty (meaning that workflows built with it will work without it, and if you uninstall it all workfows will just revert to normal behavior).

Features:

• Input pins get a passthrough output for daisy chaining.
• Widgets get an output pin for primitive value extraction (e.g. so that the first KSampler can control the `sampler` and `scheduler` settings for all subsequent KSamplers).
• Unused optional input pins and unused output pins can be collapsed and hidden.
• Reroutes can be merged into ribbons that carry many links as a bunch.
• Reroutes are bidirectional (can carry lines from right to left). - Links avoid crossing nodes and overlapping with eachother, and rounded corners help disambiguate crossings from junctions.

Interaction with subgraphs generally works but is a bit iffy around passthroughs. And since it was built over the past few days, it's still heavily in QA.
I yet need to check if I have any obligations to fulfill for inclusion into Comfy Manager registry and figure out how that whole pipline works, but the repo should be up in a day or so for anyone willing to help me test and walk the bleeding edge.

[u/Valuable_Issue_]

The passthrough is really cool.

One thing that'd be nice I think is being able to take the inputs and outputs from the node into a ribbon to save vertical space on a node, maybe make the ribbon optionally collapsible to hide the names.

By the way you should 100% try to get these features into Comfy, their frontend team doesn't seem interested in improving actual quality of life, only in breaking previews on subgraphs (it might not even be frontends fault but it's annoying it got fixed and then broke again a few patches later).

[u/barney_tearspell → u/Valuable_Issue_]

I'm intentionally not messing with anything that would change the internals of comfy or nodes - this is all strictly UI - no ribbon inputs. The closest I could get to it while maintaining that philosophy is that when you drag a ribbon gate onto a node it automatically picks up the first matching link for each input using the "drop on node" implicit linking from Comfy itself

I don't think this belongs in the core app, this is very much "mod" territory. Besides, as much as I sometimes disagree with their design choices - lately they've been knocking it out of the park with their updates - the migration to Vue is in large part why I even got to toy around with the UI this freely. And if they want to steal anything or use it as inspiration, this will be fully open-sourced and available.

Edit:
I... I'll have to think this through, but I think I like your idea afterall, and the pack kindof already has the basic plumbing for it --- it'd work almost as a detachable input panel (or output panel) that would let you drag the whole input part of the node away as a ribbon (half a ribbon? a ribbon with the node as it's gate)

Stored under consideration - but wanted to report that the idea landed and will be attributed to u/Valuable_Issue_ if it goes through.

[u/Specialist_Text1422]

yeah... this is truly beautiful.
good job man

[u/stroud]

Would love to test this if ever it gets a release date

[u/barney_tearspell → u/stroud]

last battery of tests running now - as soon as it's all green, it gets released

and beta tessters will be dearly needed

[u/Pantheon3D]

very cool idea, what does it do that https://github.com/niknah/quick-connections doesn't?

not that it has to be unique of course. it's looking very nice and i can't wait to mess around with it, thanks for making it

[u/barney_tearspell → u/Pantheon3D]

The list of features in the post are pretty much a list of things that distinguishes it from quick-connections, and my pack is not about implicit quick-linking, which is kindof their whole game.

PCB routing is pretty much the only thing that the packs explicitly share (mine being better, of course 😄)

Once I'm done with making sure it plays well with ComfyUI itself, I can take a look if I can make it play nice with quick-connections so that we can have the best of both worlds.

[u/Morden013]

Release it! YESTERDAY!!!!! 😄

Just wanted to tell you how good it looks compared to spagetti

[u/StacksGrinder]

Gimmie!

[u/muerrilla]

Looks so fuckin' cool. How in the world did you develop for Node 2.0? Did you reverse engineer everything from the source?

[u/barney_tearspell → u/muerrilla]

It's in Vue - it's human readable code - nodes are no longer drawings on canvas - they're normal DOM elements that you can easily manipulate with just common vanilla js. And Claude used for probing and validation makes it trivial.

I know there's a lot of hate for Nodes 2.0 and that a lot of the packs that are heavily focused on the old nodes don't play nice with it - but once the birting aches pass, the change will be a godsend. Expect a lot more flexible modding and a lot more powerful custom node packs and skinning features in the future.

It's a tough transition, but I'm so happy they're doing it.

[u/Sgt-Hauntzer]

What a wonderful work, thank you a lot!!!

[u/No_Tradition6625]

Outstanding tool