How to “correctly” start an application from a shell

I find it hard to phrase the question precisely but I will give my best. I use dwm as my default window manager and dmenu as my application launcher. I hardly use GUI applications aside from my browser. Most of my work is done directly from the command line. Furthermore, I’m a great fan of minimalism regarding operating systems, applications etc. One of the tools I never got rid of was an application launcher. Mainly because I lack a precise understanding of how application launchers work/what they do. Even extensive internet search only shows up vague explanation. What I want to do is get rid even of my application launcher because apart from actually spawning the application I have absolutely no use for it. In order to do this I would really like to know how to “correctly” start applications from the shell. Whereby the meaning of “correctly” can be approximated by “like an application launcher would do”. I do not claim that all application launchers work the same way because I do not understand them well enough.