emacs &
Forks but the process is attached to the shell
nohup emacs &
Something like that works but seems to make some kind of log file
Just what exactly is alt+f2 doing?
After you start a background process with &
you can use the builtin disown
to detach it from the shell and let it run detached. That is also more or less what nohup
does, save the log being associated.
In essence, Alt-F2 starts a process and disowns it.