How to fix the touchpad randomly placing the cursor on the screen when using gnome-shell with xorg:

This is due to the lib that manages touchpad changed from the old (deprecated) synaptics to libinput (which also manages keyboards and other input devices).

According to some research I did on the internet libinput is much better, but we have a problem: if we have libinput and synaptics both installed, the touchpad gets crazy.

So, the solution to that is to remove all packages that have synaptics on their names:

$ sudo pacman -Rd xf86-input-synaptics libsynaptics

This way, the touchpad will work as desired.

Also, to configure left and right click using the touchpad, you must configure them through “Gnome Tweak Tool”:

Keyboard and Mouse => Touchpad => Click Method => Fingers.

In that case, pressing:

• one finger on the touchpad is a left click
• 2 fingers is the right click.