I finally decided to cave in and give vim a try recently as well, but quickly ended up using helix instead. Mainly because for most of the IDE type functionality you don’t have to mess around with plugins at all, which i really hated about both vim and neovim. I also really like that all my favorite themes are already built-in. As for getting into it, for helix it can be as simple as adding it to your packages list (or maybe there’s a module to enable it, idk). For the lsp to work you just need to install the language server you need and helix should find it on your path. I recommend just going through the tutor, and after that, just get familiar with it by using it for anything you want to edit, even if it’s just simple config files. I still have a long way to go myself but after just a few days i noticed becoming faster and the motions feeling less clunky. Also don’t worry about memorizing all the commands. Just stick with some basics and as you go you’ll find more commands that you realize are usefull, and build your knowledge up slowly like that.
Edit: just realized i may have misread and that you were only asking about how to install the nix way, instead of being new to vim/helix 😶 oh well lol
I prefer using the native language usually, but i also don’t manage my dotfiles with home manager at all anymore, because i have scripts that need to edit my dotfiles with sed, so if i need to then rerun home manager switch again every time it slows down my scripts a lot. I know there’s out-of-store symlinks for that, but that didn’t work either cause sed would always error out when trying to follow the symlink chain, so i just gave up on it.