Indeed windows for development is not always as streamlined as a unix-based system like OS X. I use a surface pro 3 with windows 8.1 and wrote a python script that opens a cygwin terminal at the top of my screen to provide Guake-like functionality for windows. Most development work I do however is done within a Ubuntu virtual machine, but then again I've usually been doing web development over the past couple years.
Someday someone should write a book published by one of the tech book publishers about how to set up non Visual Studio dev environments on Windows (RoR, Django, PHP/MySQL, etc). It seems like things have gotten to the point where developing on Windows == MSFT dev tools, and everything else is Mac/*nix.
It honestly feels a lot like all the kids in the neighborhood just got new mountain bikes and you're still using a scooter. You can usually keep up, but as soon as they go off the road, you're on your own.
VMs are 100% the way to go, but I am consistently frustrated by incompatibility, especially with the nodejs ecosystem. Windows users are a huge minority so tools are rarely built with a non *Nix environment in mind.
It certainly feels that way, perhaps because I'm so used to apt on linux and windows just doesn't have any equivalent tools that I'm aware of. There's still a long ways to go on the software side to bridge the gap between the Microsoft and open source ecosystems.
been using windows for web development for a long time. almost every tool comes with windows support. there are some exceptions but there are always alternatives.
If all you want is a dropdown terminal emulator with Cygwin/git-bash or the windows command prompt why not just use https://conemu.github.io/ . You can configure it to behave just like guake/yakuake. No need for Python scripts.
