Recomendations for theme devlopment tools on win 10 environment

Greetings,

I’m new to Shopify / Liquid and still working on my first dev store soon to go live (migrating a client over from a self hosted Zen Cart store). I’m working with a purchased OS2 theme and started to make a few liquid mods using the code editor. Figured it might be a good time to setup a local dev tool chain on my win 10 system and get familiar with that before the store goes live.

I’m coming form a PHP/MySQL knowledge base and familiar with local xampp dev environment.

From what I’ve read and videos I’ve watched, I have a few choices on how I can install the Shopify CLI. Either by installing the Ruby+Devkit for windows or enable the WSL and installing Ubuntu VM. I don’t currently use git, but do have an account. Also will probably start using Visual Studio Community IDE as my editor and move away from a very old Dreamweaver editor.

Any suggestions / recommendations? Is there a way to use my existing xampp environment for working with theme development?

Thanks!