You can get pretty far with copy-pasting. If you want to try it out, you should first realize that there's always 10+ different ways to do the same thing. Stick with what works and with what seems the most intuitive to you.
Personally, I suggest going straight for a flake-based setup. Flakes are somehow still labeled experimental, but they're actually mature and broadly adopted.
After trying out a few distros over the last 20 years or so (~~open~~SUSE, Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, Fedora and Silverblue were the ones I actively used for a stretch of time on desktop, Debian and CentOS on server), I also landed on NixOS.
Who knows what the future brings, but things feel more settled to me than they ever have. Maybe that's because there's a (declarative) solution for every custom setup, it's just a function of time and profiency in Nix. Or maybe it's because I invested quite a bit of work into a trivially reproducible setup for most of my machines and workflows (all in one glorious version-controlled flake), that the sunk costs are too high to switch elsewhere.
I'm still willing to experiment with DEs/WMs, currently running Gnome on my main and Sway on weaker machines. Hyprland is a bit out there for my taste, but I'm really looking forward to giving Cosmic DE a try once it's ready.
Yeah with its flags / regex / python support UltiSnips is really the gold standard of a snippet engine. In many other environments "snippets" really just means "substitute one string for another", where UltiSnips is so much more!
I use (neo)vim with UltiSnips for coding, text editing and writing e-mails, and it works great! It's super customizable.
I'm looking forward to try it myself... and also wondering if I'll ever be able to read it as b-cache-fs rather than bca-chefs.
Into the breach