Thanks for creating the patch.  Since it is a feature, it would be considered to be applied to the current py3k branch (which at the moment is what will be going into the 3.2 release) rather than 3.1 which is generally only accepting bug fixes.

By the way, since I was investigating some other issues in IDLE for OS X, I thought it would be interesting to try the code here on the current 3.2. To that end, I did a quick forward port of the patch file, vidle20101012.diff, to the current py3k (3.2) branch.  The results are attached, but need to be thoroughly reviewed.  I simply did a quick test which indicated the patch did not have an impact one way or the other on the other issues so, at the moment, I am not planning to work further on this patch. I am uploading it here in case it might be of use.

Some notes: the 3.2 version of the patch differs because some of the changes in the original patch have already been checked in to py3k; there was another new file missing from the original patch (utils.py) which I pulled in from the vpython.org VIDLE 3.1.2 source patch, and I noticed one line in IOBinding.py that is commented out in the vidle20101012.diff file but not in the vpython.org source (I added a further comment there around line 240).