How to force a program to stay open?

How do I open a program from terminal and force it to stay in the same workspace as the terminal?

• In my daily work, I can usually divide the task at hand into two or three subtasks, for example MATLAB programming, LaTeX typesetting and Skype communication. For this, I like to keep the different subtasks in different workspaces, so I can just switch from one subtask to the next by jumping between workspaces. When I start my computer, the first thing I do is usually to start one of the programs I need from the terminal, then move to the next workspace, start a new terminal there and start another program for another subtask. Currently, each window that starts appear in the currently active workspace. However, I don't want to wait for the program window to load before I move to the next workspace. Is there any way I can force a program to start in the workspace that's active when I give the command to start the process, instead of in the workspace that's currently active when the window loads?

• Answer:

  Take a look at http://burtonini.com/blog/computers/devilspie. It can be used to perform some actions on specific windows. For example it is possible to move a Firefox window to workspace 2: (if (is (application_name) "Firefox") (begin (set_workspace 2) (maximize) ) )