The Emacs Command of the Day Twitter feed tells us something that I didn’t know:
Fun fact about the minibuffer: you can click it when it’s inactive! This opens the *Messages* buffer.
(Especially handy if you want to read messages that recently appeared in the minibuffer.)
— Ⓔ Command of the Day (@ecotd) April 18, 2022
That’s a really handy way of popping up the *Messages* buffer and it works even though the minibuffer is not active. Of course, you have to use the mouse to invoke it but that’s not too bad if you have a laptop with a trackpad—especially a MacBook where you can do the whole operation with your thumb while keeping your fingers on the home row.
There are many ways of popping up the *Messages* buffer—Ctrl+h e for example—but clicking on the minibuffer seems particularly easy. If you’ve taken a sacred pledge to abjure mouse usage from within Emacs, this method is obviously not for you but if you’re flexible about the mouse it’s a nice thing to know.
UPDATE : adjure → abjure