It's not "Emacs" itself, it's plugins and Elisp libraries you have loaded. Emacs itself - the GUI, even including (optionally) blinking cursor - is actually quite fast.

To prove this, this command:

    time emacs -Q --eval "(kill-emacs)"

reports ~0.2 sec on my system.

My normal Emacs, just as yours, needs ~12 seconds to start up. But I made it this way by explicitly enabling and requiring things. I could, with some effort, get the time down to 5-8 seconds (byte-compilation and gathering autoloads in one place), and even back to around a second if I was desperate enough to try dumping the image of a running Emacs to disk (I did it once and succeeded, although the process wasn't pretty). I don't do this because I don't care that much, but the option is there.

Yes, this is true. But emacs without plugins isn't worth much, and I'm too old to enjoy playing the configuration fiddle for more than a few minutes

export EDITOR="emacsclient -a ''"

Unfortunately the group of plugins I use combined with running in windows just isn't stable enough to keep a server process running.

Admittedly this is a corporate laptop with all their virus crap running, so no editor is fast. But emacs in particular has very bad startup times for me.

For me Emacs opens up in about 2 seconds and it's ready to go and print text input in scratch buffer. I am on 2015 MacBook Pro 13" with i5.

That's been my experience as well, although that's still too slow for my tastes as a vim user.

But I definitely don't ever recall it being 8 seconds, that feels like either an exaggeration or someone working on a potato.

> that feels like either an exaggeration or someone working on a potato.

Haha, no. It depends on what you use Emacs for. Remember the old joke about Emacs being a great OS? The reality is that Emacs is a great computing environment for almost anything that deals with text and even for some completely unrelated things. If you want a cross-platform GUI then Emacs Lisp may be one of the choices available.

This caused "plugins" - Elisp applications - to flourish and over the years a lot of code was written. Long story short, I have ~640000 (not a typo) lines of Elisp in my ~/.emacs.d/ alone, not counting the built-in Elisp libraries. It takes time to load that much code, even if it's byte-compiled beforehand.

fair enough, I've never been able to stay with emacs long enough to collect the plugins.

The 1-2 second startup was slow enough that I couldn't even stay with the Emacs evil mode.

For me, it takes <700ms, but that's because I leave it running all the time and call emacsclient from the command line.

There is something wrong with your system.