> I have never thought about what should happen if you try to select a sequence of text that mixes rtl and ltr languages.
I would expect it to go all the same direction across the text, regardless of which are rtl and ltr characters. If swiping left to right, ltrs would be selected forward, and rtls would be selected backwards (the same as if you just swiped ltrs from right to left).
Same here. In the same way as if I were to physically cut text from a piece of paper using scissors, I’d expect a visually contiguous region to be selected for copy/cut/paste (both when using mouse and keyboard). Even though that might not be a contiguous part of the text buffer, nor a contiguous part of how the words would be spoken, I think that behavior is least confusing.
With why would you expect tthis instead of semantic selection? After all, you don't select for visual fun, but to do something with the text, like copy& paste it, so where would you need to select words in their logical order in ltr and illogical order in rtl?
I would expect it to go all the same direction across the text, regardless of which are rtl and ltr characters. If swiping left to right, ltrs would be selected forward, and rtls would be selected backwards (the same as if you just swiped ltrs from right to left).