Comment 7 for bug 122047

a7x, you may be either happy or dismayed to know that you can obtain a nearly identical (and more accurate, for reasons that I didn't feel like investigating) result using:

aptitude --disable-columns -F 'can_be_marked_as_auto %p' search '~i!~M~R(~i)'
aptitude --disable-columns -F 'no_dependents %p' search '~i!~M!~R(~i)'

You can refer to http://algebraicthunk.net/~dburrows/projects/aptitude/doc/en/ch02s03s05.html for the meanings of the search string - ~R(~i) matches packages whose reverse depends are installed on the system.

However, it's better to use:

aptitude --disable-columns -F 'can_be_marked_as_auto %p' search '~i!~M (~R(~i)|~Rrecommends:(~i))'
aptitude --disable-columns -F 'no_dependents %p' search '~i!~M !(~R(~i)|~Rrecommends:(~i))'

The above includes recommends as well as depends, which is how aptitude calculates which packages to remove anyway.

A tabular list of all manually installed packages can be obtained using:
aptitude search '~i!~M'