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List explicitly installed packages that are not in the base or base-devel groups

comm -23 <(pacman -Qqe | sort) <(pacman -Qqg base base-devel | sort) | sort -n

Or the same with size and description, sorted by size:

expac -H M "%011m\t%-20n\t%10d" $(comm -23 <(pacman -Qqe | sort) <(pacman -Qqg base base-devel | sort)) | sort -n

Note: I dropped -n from the Pacman options to include AUR packages.

List packages that are optional dependencies and not installed explicitly

comm -13 <(pacman -Qdtq | sort) <(pacman -Qdttq | sort)

Note: Run pacman -Qi on any package in the output to see which package it is Optional For. If you run pacman -Qi with those packages, too, you usually get a description of the functionality the optional dependency provides. See also: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman/Tips_and_tricks https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/System_maintenance Slightly related: List packages by their install date

expac --timefmt="%F %T" "%l %w %n" | grep explicit | cut -d ' ' -f 1-2,4- | sort -n

This only lists the most recent install date. Not sure if this one is in the wiki.