But ask politely, or you will likely be ignored.

I think the OP turned it into an idiotic request, even though you warned them against doing something dumb; see: https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issues/10012

I know if I were a developer on Notepad++, I would certainly ignore this request. What is wrong with people?

It (Selective Search and Replace in Column Mode) is beautifully handled in EditPad Lite 8 from year 2020 !?! But in Notepad++ it is still not possible in 2021 !!

Instead of whining about it to a bunch of fellow users, you should politely go make the feature request, as described in the FAQ that I linked you to. But ask politely, or you will likely be ignored.

Reasonable idea. I see that (in my v8.0 install) the “in selection” box starts grey if you start with column selection, or greys out and deselects if you switch from a normal selection to a column selection, which obviously means you cannot use the normal search-in-selection feature on column editing.

However, the developers do not track bug reports or feature requests that are made in this Forum, and the rest of us in the Forum do not have the authority and/or skill to make codebase changes to the application. However, this Forum does have a FAQ entry called “Feature Request and Bug Report”, which explains how and where to make feature requests and bug reports. As explained in that FAQ, always check and make sure the feature hasn’t already been requested . If you do make a feature request, it is considered polite to come back to this discussion and post a link to the request, so that others who find your question here will easily be able to see what happened with the request.