Question

I executed C-x M-k to kill a paragraph in Emacs. The echo area showed C-x M-k, as expected.

However, is it possible to (also) show the name of the last command just executed, for reference? This would be useful for learning purposes, as well as confirming that the command executed was the command intended.

Answer 1

This isn’t necessarily a good idea, but you can advise call-interactively to do what you say:

(defadvice call-interactively (after show-last-command activate)
  "Shows the interactive command that was just run in the message area."
  (unless (eq major-mode 'minibuffer-inactive-mode)
    (message "Ran %s" (ad-get-arg 0))))

To turn this off, run (ad-unadvise 'call-interactively).