I'm a commandline guy and use vim for development, so my question would be why would you want to install a GUI, when there's a perfectly good CLI?! ;)
Having said that, I would recommend installing full/proper vim if you plan on using that. FYI our servers ship with vim-tiny which is fine for simple text editing, but IMO the code highlighting (and support for plugins) is well worth the few MB that the full vim offers. Do that like this:
apt update
apt install vim
But if you prefer a UI, then there are a couple of options.
The first would be to use your current GUI and connect to your VM. AFAIK, most IDEs these days support SSH. Assuming your IDE of preference does support that, simply configure SSH and do your development (in your VM) from your main OS?! Even if your IDE doesn't support SSH, then you could use an SFTP client (e.g. Filezilla) to mirror the relevant files to your local OS. It's been ages since I developed via a non-CLI environment, but IIRC it can be configured to auto sync. The only other consideration there is that you need to be sure not to edit any of the files in Notepad! (If you are using Windows, then editing Linux files within most Windows specific tools, will stop them working on Linux).
The other option would be installing a GUI as you asked. Under the hood, TurnKey is Debian, so you could install a window manager, or even a full desktop environment if you really wanted.
It's not really something I would recommend for a few reasons. The main one is that I anticipate that it will a bit of effort to set up (TurnKey is after all designed to work as a headless server; not a desktop!). There are lots of things that you'll need to consider, such as user accounts and how they will interact with both the desktop and Mayan (you should never run a GUI as root, but as a limited user, you won't have write access to Mayan - if you change the permissions of Mayan, it may not run properly, etc...).
Your server will also need much more RAM and CPU resources that a headless server. Mayan-EDMS is already a fairly resource intensive app, so I would expect it to significantly drag on your hosts resources. If you have a modern PC with good hardware specs (or are running the VM on a different host that has tons of resources) then it may be fine, but it's good to be aware of. You can find more info about different GUI environments on Debian on the wiki.
I hope that's of some value to you? If you have further questions, or need clarification, please ask. Also, I'd be interested to hear which path you choose and how you go with it all.
I'm a commandline guy and use vim for development
I'm a commandline guy and use vim for development, so my question would be why would you want to install a GUI, when there's a perfectly good CLI?! ;)
Having said that, I would recommend installing full/proper vim if you plan on using that. FYI our servers ship with vim-tiny which is fine for simple text editing, but IMO the code highlighting (and support for plugins) is well worth the few MB that the full vim offers. Do that like this:
But if you prefer a UI, then there are a couple of options.
The first would be to use your current GUI and connect to your VM. AFAIK, most IDEs these days support SSH. Assuming your IDE of preference does support that, simply configure SSH and do your development (in your VM) from your main OS?! Even if your IDE doesn't support SSH, then you could use an SFTP client (e.g. Filezilla) to mirror the relevant files to your local OS. It's been ages since I developed via a non-CLI environment, but IIRC it can be configured to auto sync. The only other consideration there is that you need to be sure not to edit any of the files in Notepad! (If you are using Windows, then editing Linux files within most Windows specific tools, will stop them working on Linux).
The other option would be installing a GUI as you asked. Under the hood, TurnKey is Debian, so you could install a window manager, or even a full desktop environment if you really wanted.
It's not really something I would recommend for a few reasons. The main one is that I anticipate that it will a bit of effort to set up (TurnKey is after all designed to work as a headless server; not a desktop!). There are lots of things that you'll need to consider, such as user accounts and how they will interact with both the desktop and Mayan (you should never run a GUI as root, but as a limited user, you won't have write access to Mayan - if you change the permissions of Mayan, it may not run properly, etc...).
Your server will also need much more RAM and CPU resources that a headless server. Mayan-EDMS is already a fairly resource intensive app, so I would expect it to significantly drag on your hosts resources. If you have a modern PC with good hardware specs (or are running the VM on a different host that has tons of resources) then it may be fine, but it's good to be aware of. You can find more info about different GUI environments on Debian on the wiki.
I hope that's of some value to you? If you have further questions, or need clarification, please ask. Also, I'd be interested to hear which path you choose and how you go with it all.