I recently switched to Spacemacs and I'm really enjoying it. If you're a Vim user who wants to try Emacs, or an Emacs user who wants to work faster I recommend trying it.

Pardon my ignorance but just running `git clone --recursive http://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs ~/.emacs.d` would install it? Wouldn't I need a working Emacs installation first? If yes, which one should I install for a Mac?

You do need Emacs installed - First get it from http://emacsformacosx.com

You can also do "brew install emacs". I think that is the preferred option for Spacemacs.

This thing is really great. Been playing around with it for a few days and threw away my old .emacs. It's that good.

One pro is that it will make plenty of excellent emacs packages easily discoverable.

can anyone teach me how to add erlang-elixir layer to dotspacemacs-configuration-layers list in ~/.spacemacs

(setq-default ;; List of configuration layers to load. dotspacemacs-configuration-layers '(erlang-elixir) )