You may notice that the option key does not work if you are running jEdit on OSX, let’s fix that!

Using jEdit go to /Applications/jEdit.app/Contents/Resources/Java/startup/
and open startup.bsh

In startup.bsh go to line 87 (or around there) and find the line
//Debug.ALT_KEY_PRESSED_DISABLED = false;

change it to
Debug.ALT_KEY_PRESSED_DISABLED = false;

After restarting jEdit the option key should work. Now, you can hold the option key and press the left and right arrows to move quickly between different words.

Hooray!