How to disable typing special characters when pressing option key in Mac OS X? [closed]

Answer 1

Using the Apple JRE, the Option key combinations will work as shortcuts instead of inserting special characters.

Download link: https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1572?locale=en_US

It's an old outdated JRE (based on Java 6) but as of October 2015 it's still what seems to work best w/ my JetBrains RubyMine installation. (Anything else, the keys go back to inserting special characters.)