there's also disown. It's a bash builtin, so you'll have to type "help disown" ("man disown" gets you nothing). E.g. to run touchegg and close your terminal, keeping touchegg running:

   touchegg & disown; exit

I use an alias for it:

    function launch {
    	type $1 >/dev/null || { print "$1 not found" && return 1 }
    	$@ &>/dev/null &|
    }
    alias launch="launch "

why the alias as well as the function?

ah, thanks for that tip :-)