Is there a way to find out what your last several keystrokes were?

Factual Questions
1

Periodically, I do something stupid on my keyboard quite by accident. This morning, for instance, I was typing in a comment box very much like this one, but on another website, when some combination of keys I typed turned everything on the page from Arial typeface to Times New Roman (or one of its close cousins). How the $&%! did I do that, I wondered.

Similarly for when I accidentally highlight everything in a comment box like this - and the next keystroke, of course, replaces the highlighted content with that keystroke. I’d just like to know how the devil I did that.

So is there anyplace in a Windows XP environment on a PC where one can go to see one’s last several keystrokes?

2

You can spy on yourself with a keylogger like this one.

3

I’m not aware of a legitamate function to do this within Windows, but there are plenty of malware / spyware apps and little covert hardware devices called keyloggers that do what you’re thinking of. They just sit there and watch the signals coming down the wire from your keyboard and record it all, usuallyfor nefarious purposes.

If you’re doing wholesale clobbers, you’re probably managing to hit Control-A, which is the universal shortcut for “select all” and the next keystroke replaces everything that was selected.

4

That one is easy. You almost certainly pressed Ctrl+a rather that Shift+a.

Edit => Undo will fix.

5

Or <Ctrl>Z - this acts to undo edits in text fields even when there may be no explicit undo menu option.

On keyloggers, I’d be very wary installing any of these on your machine unless you’re absolutely sure it’s from a reputable source.

6

I bet the other one is also a Ctrl problem, too. This lefthander’s right pinky more than occasionally misses the intended key.

Wonder how one would disable a key - I don’t ever intentionally use the Ctrl key in the lower right of the keyboard, but I apparently unintentionally use it more than I’d like.

7

Ctrl + Mousewheel will change the size of text on your page, and sometimes change the fonts.

8

There do exist legitimate keyloggers-- Businesses sometimes use them to monitor their employees’ computer usage. That said, I don’t know of any brand names, and blindly Googling for one would probably get you one of the disreputable ones.