How to view a list of packages that were manually installed without their dependancies

How do I see a list of packages I manually (really manually, as in I typed them in) installed?

I want to exclude packages that were installed as a result of being dependencies of other packages that I manually typed in.

For example, if I ran the command:

sudo apt-get install mysql-server

and as a result mysql-common was installed, I want to only see mysql-server in the list and not mysql-common.

I've searched for an answer and found many that were close but not exactly what I want.

It's much better to use apt-mark tool:

apt-mark showmanual

This is exactly what you want. You also can mark packages as manually installed or not and hold the packages on fixed versions.

That do what you want:

cat /var/log/apt/history.log | grep -E 'apt(-get)? install '