I believe the poster was referring to getting the ellipses
character that is used for, say, "Preferences..." If you type
option-; in the terminal it doesn't understand and adds a useless
"key equivalent" into the defaults.

Needless to say, "Preferences~;" is not the way to get the right
character ;) I believe the @,$,~,^ only affect the key
equivalent and do nothing for the name of the key equivalent.

So, yes, how does one get the proper "..." character entered via
the terminal?

Sorry, this above post was meant for the question about getting
the "..." character.

You must enter three periods instead of the actual ellipsis character for this trick to work, at leat this is true for me with "TextEdit".

It appears that using three periods (literally typing ...) works.
*shrug* it didn't last night when I tried it, but TextEdit seemed
to pick it up just fine today.