Question

I am using TinyMCE to provide rich text formatting options and I want to change the styling of the buttons in the editor. I want to make it neater like the editor that stack overflow has. Can it be done without having to write my custom TinyMCE editor?

Answer 1

You can define what image to use for your buttons using the editor_css (a tinymce init setting)

editor_css : '../../../js/tiny_mce/css/editor.css',

The css will overwrite the css used for the tinymce UI including buttons.
The default css depends on the selected mode.
Her is a part of my editor.css as example

.defaultSkin span.mce_delete {background:url(../../../editor/images/delete.gif)}
.defaultSkin span.mce_rename {background:url(../../../editor/images/help.gif)}