As for your local enviroment i agree with Mike, your best of with local by flywheel for these kind of tasks.
As for your workflow... In your WordPress install there is a folder called wp-content, inside that there is a folder called plugins. Just create a new folder there with the name of your plugin. inside that folder create a php file with the same name. Add your plugin header to that file (developer.wordpress.org/plugins/pl...) and you have a empty working plugin, and you can just write your code there instead of zipping and uploading all the time.
As for your local enviroment i agree with Mike, your best of with local by flywheel for these kind of tasks.
As for your workflow... In your WordPress install there is a folder called wp-content, inside that there is a folder called plugins. Just create a new folder there with the name of your plugin. inside that folder create a php file with the same name. Add your plugin header to that file (developer.wordpress.org/plugins/pl...) and you have a empty working plugin, and you can just write your code there instead of zipping and uploading all the time.
Next you will have to check out the wp plugin api (developer.wordpress.org/plugins/ho...) and you can start hacking away.
If you have more questions let me know... :)