Dan Norton composed on 2017-11-22 19:09 (UTC-0500):
...
4. This laptop I'm borrowing is notorious for having a hyper-sensitive touch
pad. You can be typing along in the spot you have chosen for input and suddenly
it gets a wild hair and relocates the cursor to somewhere else. As a hunt and
peck typist, I've been victimized many times by this and had to undo and start
over. The new insertion point is unpredictable AFAICT.
Perhaps you need to investigate syndaemon. This disables the Synaptics
touchpad whenever a key is struck. The disabled period is configurable,
so if I type
$ syndaemon -i 1
into any old Xterm, the cursor will be dead for one second after any
key is struck. You can set it up in the background with -d and
put it in .xsession or equivalent.
The only downside is if you're adept at two-handed work with cursor
and keystrokes, but bear in mind that any attached mouse is unaffected.