I'm looking for the same thing here. I have a somewhat hacky approach that I discovered on the TinyMCE forums and am currently looking for a better approach.
By throwing an error after the blur event is fired it prevents TinyMCE's cleanup from removing the editor.
tinymce.init({
menubar: false,
plugins: "advlist autolink lists link image charmap print preview anchor searchreplace visualblocks code fullscreen insertdatetime media textcolor table contextmenu paste wordcount",
toolbar: [
"undo redo removeformat searchreplace code",
"styleselect fontsizeselect forecolor",
"bold italic underline strikethrough superscript subscript",
"alignleft aligncenter alignright alignjustify | outdent indent blockquote",
"bullist numlist table | link image media"
],
selector: '.selected .inline-preview',
inline: true,
autofocus: true,
fixed_toolbar_container: 'section[data-sidebar-text-controls] > div',
init_instance_callback: function () {
tinymce.activeEditor.focus();
},
setup: function (editor) {
editor.on('blur', function () {
throw new Error('tiny mce hack workaround');
});
}
});