Recompressing ckeditor.js to fit your needs

Note:
Most of the content of this post as well as some corrections are available now at the official documentation for CKEditor: CKPackager - Compressing CKEditor
This post will remain here only for historical reference and to link to the new documentation (the one that you should read)

The javascript code of CKEditor is delivered as one main ckeditor.js where all the code has been compressed and merged (of course, not ALL the code, just the code that is needed for the core and the default plugins, the code of the dialogs for example is loaded on demand). And one question that you might have is: how can I compress my own version? I'll try to provide here some explanations and notes about this, but despite its length it is far from a full guide and it might contain some incorrect parts.

First you have download the ckpackager.jar (there's also an .exe for those in windows that haven't installed Java) from
http://svn.fckeditor.net/CKPackager/trunk/bin/ckpackager.jar and put it at the root of your CKEditor folder. (Note that this is a SVN repository so it should contain the latest version)

Backup the existing ckeditor.js and ckeditor_basic.js so you can check that the process is working correctly.

Now the first step is to verify that you have Java correctly installed and that everything is correct in your environment, so fire up the console/terminal/command prompt and navigate to the CKEditor folder and type there the command to start the compilation. This should generate identical files to the previous ckeditor.js and ckeditor_basic.js if you haven't changed anything in the _source folder:

java -jar ckpackager.jar ckeditor.pack

Maybe the js files aren't identical to the previous ones due to some change in the version of CKPackager used to compress the released version of CKEditor and some fix/improvement made to CKPackager since that moment, but the overall should be similar and you should be able to use the new files without differences.

Working with the source files

Now you can try to apply changes to the files under _source and test them using the ckeditor_source.js, and when you are ready to deploy you just have to compress them all again. You should be careful with your changes because compressing the source means that any slight error can be fatal.

The new packager is based on Rhino, the javascript implementation in Java from the people at Mozilla, so I don't know how it does deal with missing semicolons, and other minor issues that can be fatal with some compression systems. Of course it's better to write code without problems instead of relying on the tools to fix them.

Selecting just what you want

The ckeditor.js file includes all the plugins (but not all the code of the plugins: the dialogs are lazy loaded only when needed as I said). So if you don't want to provide several options to your users you could remove those plugins, not only from the toolbar, but also from the packaged file so you can end up with a much smaller ckeditor.js file.

In order to change what's included you need to edit ckeditor.pack and remove the entries about plugins that you don't need.

Don't alter the entries under '_source/core/*' because the editor probably will fail. Remember that if you mess with the packaging process no one else can help you, you are the one that is editing the file and not knowing what to do isn't a good idea here.

An example of a change would be to remove the line

                '_source/plugins/elementspath/plugin.js',

if you don't want to show the elements path at the bottom of the editor (there's the config.removePlugins = 'elementspath' option but that means that the code is still loaded so if you are sure that you never need this option you can save some bytes). Then you save the file and issue the recompress command, and now the ckeditor.js is 2Kb smaller.

Of course it seems that it would be a trial/error the process to find what are the files that you can remove as one plugin might depend upon another and so you need it to run correctly. In order to generate the default ckeditor.pack file, the SVN version of CKEditor includes a _dev folder with some development tools and that includes a packager folder with a HTML file created to generate the correct content according to the current configuration (this is meant to be used in the SVN version, I don't know how it will deal with the released version).

Optimizing the downloads

If you check the ckeditor.pack file you can see that the lang file isn't compressed, this is due to the fact that not everybody speaks English, so packaging the en.js file for everybody would mean a waste of bytes, but if you know that your users speak only one language, then you could specify that language in the ckeditor.pack file and get it bundled along the others.

This will increase the size of ckeditor.js but remember that those bytes were downloaded separately as another request, so now the editor will be slightly faster as we have avoided that extra step.

At the bottom of the file you can see that the kama.js file is also being bundled, so if you are using another skin you could adjust that to remove the kama and put your own one, avoiding the extra download of your selected skin.

And if you are using some custom plugin you can include it in the list so it's ready along the rest of files and the user don't suffer an extra delay for the usage of your plugins.

This is just a quick explanation, but it should be enough to get started about how to recompress the code.

Note:
Most of the content of this post as well as some corrections are available now at the official documentation for CKEditor: CKPackager - Compressing CKEditor
This post will remain here only for historical reference and to link to the new documentation (the one that you should read)