Almost all of my development work is via SSH to a Linux box. I still use a Mac though, because it comes with a gorgeous 256-color terminal, with the Unix shells and enough of a local Unix environment that I can just type "ssh my-linux-box" and it works. You could get something similar running on Windows, but it would feel weirdly shitty and alien.

I don't think it's "weirdly shitty and alien" at all. That is just a widespread perception that people have because they think having a UNIX-like system on their local machine somehow influences their ability to develop remotely on a UNIX-like machine. Once you've tried it, it doesn't feel strange at all.

nonsense. Cygwin is a dog. It looks horrid, it often breaks the unix abstraction with fugly windows paths and.idioms and weird issues when using libraries that have native ports. Yuck

Strawman. Did I ever mention Cygwin? If you really are a grad student, I hope you improve your reading comprehension, because I clearly stated in my first post that you don't have to run anything locally in order to do web development with Windows.

i wasn't responding to your first post. I was responding to your subsequent comment that says a local unix-like nvironment on windows is not shitty and alien. Cygwin is exactly such an environment and the best of its ilk. I claim Cygwin is shitty and alien.

So what do you use? PuTTY?

The major one: a really decent free SSH client is built into every Mac.

You must download (featured but inelegant) PuTTY in order to do this on Windows.

Also, until somewhat recently (Win7), the lack of symlinks (junctions) caused all sorts of problems when pulling down a source tree locally for editing if it contained symbolic links.

Other than that, I agree.

Just to note for existing Vista users, junctions are in Vista and junction points are even in XP (from Windows 2000).

The problem isn't the OS, it's software like SVN that didn't support junctions until much later than junctions were introduced into Vista (and backported to XP).

And then projects need to use the latest versions of those software in order to benefit... and that's assuming the feature support is stable.

As late as 2009, our windows project devs (at my old company) were at a disadvantage to OSX, Linux users.