You don't have to use the Vim editor itself, but to not take advantage of Vim key bindings is a huge miss if you're doing programing work. Most modern editors have plugins that enable them. Personally I've been using Intellij with the Vim plugin.

I'm not sure what the best way to learn is, but try `vimtutor` on your shell and keep open a Vim cheat sheet like the one here: http://michael.peopleofhonoronly.com/vim/