Emacs in terminal for OS X Leopard

I had a question about using Emacs in terminal. Is it not possible to do add ons if you do not have the GUI version? I ask because in everything I have read, it says you need to edit a ~/.emacs file which I do not seem to have. Anyone know how I can add add ons?

Thanks a lot in advance

If the file name has a . in front of it, it is hidden from the finder. Open up terminal and see if you have it under your home directory, though I would assume it most likely lives in ~/Library/Preferences.

Use the ls command in terminal to see if you have that file. Then you can open that file up in terminal as well by doing open -t -f ~/path/to/file