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 qui

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.