Many movement commands, such as forward-word, forward-sexp, forward-sentence, next-line, and their backward counterparts, support shift selection. That is, holding down Shift along with their bindings causes region to be activated and/or extended. $ emacs -Q C-x C-f /tmp/test.xml | C-M-S- ;; C-M- (translated) runs forward-sexp [] C-M-S- ;; C-M- (translated) runs forward-sexp [] However, nxml-mode’s commands do not behave this way. | C-M-S-n ;; C-M-n (translated) runs nxml-forward-element Expected: [] Observed: | The attached patch fixes this for me. It is based on current master (fd45b3f).