MacOS: How to turn off Option key printing special characters in VS Code, IntelliJ etc

Most code editors like IntelliJ, VSCode etc have many shortcuts using the 'option' key in mac. For me, using the option key would cause a special character to be printed instead of performing the shortcut. I wanted to turn this feature off. I managed to do it after some googling. To serve as a documentation, I am answering my own question below.