(In reply to comment #4)
> (In reply to comment #3)
> > Also, removing a link takes three clicks if you don't use 'clear
> > formatting'.
>
> Which is why I said there should be a separate button to remove
> links with a single click.

We're meant to be in the business of removing user confusion, not
adding to it. More buttons make things harder to understand, in
general. In this specific case I'm not sure.

> > 'Clear markup' would be more descriptive, but probably less user-
> > friendly.
>
> "Clear markup" doesn't describe what it does either, because it
> doesn't remove paragraph style, text size, templates, colour, etc.
> It only removes text formatting and links.

Actually, this is wrong. Specifically, "clear formatting" removes
everything that's an annotation (things that take text and fiddle with
it in some way), and not objects or structure - in VisualEditor
language, "styles".

I.e., things that are removed:

* Bold, italics, underlines, strikethrough, superscript, subscript,
  code style
* Text size (big/small and font-size attributes)
* Rich text annotations - links, language (lang="fr"), direction
  (dir="rtl"), …
* Colours (foreground and background highlight) on text
* Arbitrary paragraph settings (<span>s with style tags, etc.)

… and things that remain:

* Formats (paragraph/heading/preformatted/blockquote/…)
* Structure (numbered list/bulleted list/definition list/table/…)
* Objects (media items/galleries/transclusions/equations/…)

> My point is that bold and italic, etc. are a subset of formatting,
> but links aren't.

In your meaning of the term "formatting". I don't use it that way, and
neither do similar functions in other rich editors like Word or Google
Docs, I believe.

> I want the ability to remove formatting without removing links, and
> the ability to remove links without removing formatting.

I understand the request. :-) I just don't think that it's a need that
is sufficiently widely-held that we should burden all users with an
extra button and a confusing "everything except not that one sorry"
cognitive step.