What did I just do?

We've all had the experience of hitting a wrong key in emacs and either discovering wonderful new functionality, or having your world melt away. Is there a log of the most recent commands, so that when a new weird thing happens, I can figure out what I did to cause it? I hit those keys by accident, after all!

Not in front of my computer, but my memory says it's view-lossage. Or at least similar.

F1-L (function key F1, then L) is the view-lossage command on my Linux/etc installs.

There's also `C-h l` (lowercase L) which I've found to be more universally available.

You guys both rock. Thanks!

While we're on the subject, anyone know why it's called "lossage"?

Because its author experienced the same sense of loss and betrayal as OP.

Just had this experience in org mode. Now I know about effort estimates!

It seems that /u/fragglestickcar0 is pretty much right. [The New Hacker's Dictionary defines lossage](https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/jargon.html#lossage) as > The result of a bug or malfunction. This is a mass or collective noun. "What a loss!" and "What lossage!" are nearly synonymous. The former is slightly more particular to the speaker's present circumstances; the latter implies a continuing lose of which the speaker is currently a victim. Thus (for example) a temporary hardware failure is a loss, but bugs in an important tool (like a compiler) are serious lossage. It appears that this command was created specifically to show what commands may have led to the current lossage.

Your question is *exactly* why I added menu item **What Did I Do?!** to submenu [**Whoops!?**](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/HelpMenuBarPlus) of menu-bar menu **Help**. (And yeah, that menu item is bound to command `view-lossage`.)

I’m old enough to have had that conflated with Backspace, which I found the more important key.

What did you do, OP? Share! (Unless you dont wanna for privacy or something)

I had a debugger running that I'd forgotten about. While working on something else entirely, emacs would seemingly randomly switch buffers to the file being debugged. There's a sequence of 3 keystrokes in gud mode, something like C-x C-a C-s that I was accidentally tripping on because C-a and C-s are things I type absent mindedly. Ending the debugging session restored expected behavior.