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Pele: themeable SVG mermaid diagrams tool

The gist

Obsidian author kepano released Pele, a rendering library he says is 100-500× faster than mermaid.js.
It targets slow, hard-to-theme diagrams in Obsidian and is open source under MIT.

How it unfolded

  1. Oct 17, 2026kepano posts on X, Bluesky and Threads announcing Pele as his new rendering library for diagrams and charts, compatible with the latest Mermaid syntax and open source under the MIT license.
  2. Oct 17, 2026A Hacker News submission titled "Pele – Mermaid diagrams as themeable SVG" by dchest reaches 54 points and 6 comments.
  3. Oct 17, 2026A DEV Community post by lu1tr0n compares Pele's 230 kB compressed size and no declared dependencies with Mermaid.js at 1.6 MB and 23 direct dependencies.

Sources

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