I am not particularly interested in having Idle run on no-uhicode builds.  I believe the usecase is to reduce the memory footprint of a python installation, and that would suggest not including tcl/tk, tkinter, and idlelib.

Having Idle tests not fail on such a build is a good idea.  That could be easily done by adding 'requires_unicode', however that is spelled, to 2.7 test/test_idle.py.

If idlelib were to be patched, I would prefer to minimize the disruption and maintenance burden by adding 'class unicode(object): pass' and skip all the 'unicode' to '_unicode' changes.