How to speed up CKEditor

Question

We are building a blog-like application and we are in the process of choosing a WYSIWYG editor. We need very few features, so our first choice was jwysiwyg . It's very fast but it felt somewhat immature for our needs, so we switched to CKEditor (with its jQuery plugin). It's very stable and very configurable, but it takes a while for the first editor instance to appear... We followed the performance guidelines but we're still not satisfied with the outcome.
What could we try? Is there a trimmed-down version/fork of CKEditor we could use? Or is it already at "maximum speed", due to its load-as-needed plugin architecture?

Answer 1

If you don't need all the features, then the first step is to recompile it removing all the plugins that you don't want, that way it will be smaller and there will be less code running at initialization.

Also, if you are using custom plugins, then you should merge them into that ckeditor.js.

After that, it's a matter of checking if there are still other extra files that are being downloaded that you can combine (like using only one language file).