This topic has two questions: 
1. The UI only field of type “Text area” does not render a Rich Text field - rather it renders a long text field. 

The question about exposing the CKEditor contorls without having a RTF in the back end field is still open.  Question for tomorrow. 

J…

Have you inspected the html on a real rich text field? There may be a way to enable CKeditor controls with jQuery by applying the same html/css to your textarea.

You do need to add a little bit of Javascript to turn on the html editor in the rich text field.  Add an inline resource with the following code: 

(function(skuid){&nbsp; &nbsp; skuid.events.subscribe('skuid.models.initialized',function(){<br>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; skuid.$M('ModelName').getField('UIONLYFIELDNAME').htmlFormatted = true;<br>&nbsp; &nbsp; });<br>})(skuid);

The only issue that I have right now is when I try to read the UI only text area field by row.ui_field, it always returns null. The value gets set from the custom field renderer and it shows on UI correctly.