This was extremely difficult for me to figure out. Particularly for how easy it is.

As I looked into adding some of my own modifications, everything referenced accessing “your .emacs file” and “add this code to it.” Nothing said how to access it.

I took a guess and typed:

  $ emacs .emacs

into my terminal in the folder that I had installed emacs. In my case I had installed it in my root folder.

This did it!

If you get an error message, you can get more information on creating your emacs init file here. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/InitFile