Did I ever say to use WAMP or run a VM? I said to run everything remotely. Just set up a Samba share on the Linux server and mount it on the Windows machine. My SSH client of choice is KiTTY[0], though there are obviously a million options out there.
Then you can use whatever editor you want. I usually use Notepad++, but Vim, Sublime Text, etc. are available.
Something I can do as well. Local vs. remote plays no role here.
> Not to mention being independent of a net connection to develop.
This is true, but seems like an edge case to me. Wifi is available pretty much everywhere you spend significant amounts of time, and a mobile hotspot is a must if you're a mobile developer anyway.
Besides, I'm always looking stuff up while coding, so I need the connection anyway.
So you have it set so one key combo from your editor saves the file you're working on, copies it to the appropriate location on the staging server automatically, and refreshes the page in the browser? That doesn't sound so bad actually; maybe I need to rethink my VM plan for Windows web dev, which turns out to be very timely for me.
[Oh, I see, you don't even keep a local copy; you edit the remote copy directly. I wonder if the Github client for Windows can watch a remote dir.]
And yes, the remote files are directly edited. There's a volume (i.e., Z:\) on my laptop that is the remote directory I've mounted. I use Samba, but you can also use NFS by installing the necessary client software from Add/Remove Programs, if that's what you prefer.
I don't know anything about the GitHub client, so I can't help you there.