Very simple question...

....coming from a guy who used IDEs throughout all his past programming experience:

What's the difference between Vi and Emacs?

I mean apart from Emacs being huge and having a GUI (duh)

>>2

Emacs is an operating system

Pardon me. I can't seem to follow?! Are you perhaps saying that EMACs has all the tools and utilities need to cater as an OS while Vi is just and advanced text editor?

That would explain the huge difference in size.