Manjaro Linux Budgie DE Dell Inspiron 13 7000

How to reduce the keyboard and touchpad to doing only what I specifically direct them to do? I'm tired of accidentally hitting the shift key and having the cursor jump back a paragraph and delete everything in between. I'm tired of the cursor suddenly jumping somewhere while I'm typing, resulting in text being entered in the wrong place. I'm tired of accidentally hitting apparent keyboard shortcuts I didn't even know existed.

If my finger hits a key, render only that character and nothing else. If I accidentally hit two keys at once, thereby giving ambivalent instructions, do nothing. If I don't touch the touchpad deliberately, don't do anything and don't move randomly.

Any clues?

Take a look at Touchpad Indicator.

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/t...indicator-bzr/
https://launchpad.net/touchpad-indicator

Or just be very careful when you use them.

I nearly always use a USB mouse with my 'laptops', they're more portable computers, to me, so I could turn off the touchpad completely, if I wanted to, maybe that would work for you too.

Adjust the sensitivity of the touch-pad, or disable it and use a mouse.
Edit the keyboard shortcuts, removing all those that you don't use.
Be more careful!

that is something I was experiencing with the touch-pad on, my thumb or palm or some part of my hand, would lightly slip over it while typing then the menu would pop up and select cut or delete or whatever it did it would be gone

so I put that in my autostart to turn it off every time I log in. not used in dt but wm's. DT's have a settings that you can turn off the touch pad.

that's funny.
for the touchpad issues, i'd try syndaemon. it's not perfect but fairly simple to set up.
the rest - to make it system wide you'd have to disable all "special" keys on your keymap, like Ctrl, Shift, Alt etc. i'm sure that's possible, but it would render your system unusable.
or go manually through each and every application and disable ALL offending keyboard shortcuts.