By default the option key is broken for OSX. This is bad but easy to fix.

  1. Navigate to the jEdit application, it’s probably in /Applications/jEdit.
  2. Right click (or Control click) the jEdit application. This will open up a contextual menu. Choose “Show Package Contents”.
  3. From the “Contents” directory make you way to: Contents->Resources->Java->startup and open “startup.bsh” in jEdit.
  4. Once the startup.bsh file is open navigate to somewhere around line 87 and you should see the following:
    before_option_fix
  5. Remove the first two characters, “//”, so that the text pictured on line 87 looks like this:
    after_option_fix
  6. Save startup.bsh restart jEdit and the option key now functions. Yay!

To make certain this works type out a sentence like, “The dog ran fast”. You should be able to move the carrot from the beginning to the end of the line by holding command key and pressing the left or right arrow. Likewise, you should now be able to move between words by holding the option key and pressing the left and right arrow.