Comment by Joe_Cool

What hardware are you on?

On my old Ryzen 3600X running Arch it's a lot faster. Does the UI eat so much performance on OSX?

  $ time emacs -Q -e kill-emacs
  real    0m0.076s
  user    0m0.058s
  sys     0m0.018s

  $ time nvim -es --cmd 'vim.cmd("q")'
  real    0m0.028s
  user    0m0.005s
  sys     0m0.003s

vim still is a lot faster though.