select() columns using their positions

Dear useRs,

I'm still trying to learn tidyverse syntax.

I would like to select() columns based on their positions/indices, but I
cannot find a way to do that (I've seen a lot about doing that for rows,
but I could not find anything for columns). I thought it would be
obvious, but I cannot find it.

Basically, I am looking for something like:
mydata %>%
? select( vector_of_indices )
I know that the pipe is useless here, but there are more steps in my
real code.

The helper num_range() works only when headers contains the positions
(e.g. "x1, x2...").

Of course, it's easy using "[", but I expected it would be possible with
select() as well; it would make the code more readable than:
mydata %>%
? .[ vector_of_indices ]

Thank you for your help.
Ivan

Dr. Ivan Calandra
TraCEr, laboratory for Traceology and Controlled Experiments
MONREPOS Archaeological Research Centre and
Museum for Human Behavioural Evolution
Schloss Monrepos
56567 Neuwied, Germany
+49 (0) 2631 9772-243
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ivan_Calandra