TJ made a nice video about how to start with neovim and its configuration. I hope that this link is not against the rules since it's about neovim and not about vim .... Personally I find those 2 very very alike and with the features that I need for my daily work, I can use either one of them without noticing any difference.
I think I already answered my own question - I just need to learn lua really well, and then start over from scratch. Being a total rookie, I have been experiencing endless catch-22's and rabbit holes. If you can't sort the simplest fundamentals, then everything is a black box until you learn what's under the hood. That's why I chose vim/neovim over vscode. Kickstart should be good when I learn how to configure it. Thanks!
I installed the kickstart.nvim the other day by following the video. I skimmed through the README but I am a total newb and it didn't make sense so I figured that I would just come back to it later when I know more about lua and plugins. I just copied and pasted into init.lua. Some things seem to work, but what did I do? Should I start over?
Also, it's a bit frustrating. That video is out of date as it's prior to the conversion to lazy.nvim
You should rather than just dumping init.lua in place actually git clone the repo into your ~/.config directory. There are instructions for that in the README.