[Design] Will Chandler be the PIM/Knowledge Management tool I need?

[mark at mlevison.com]

When I first heard about Chandler, over a year ago.  I thought wow, this is the
Holy Grail,  a usable PIM/Knowledge Management tool.  But the more I've read in
the design mailing list, the more Chandler seems like a better Outlook (a worthy
goal).  I spent sometime in the past few days reading the wiki trying to
determine Chandler's intentions and I'm lost.

So here its what I'm looking for:
My motivitaion.  After years of reading news groups, web sites etc., I'm
struggling to keep track of the things I've read (and tried to saved).  I would
like to find a tool that allows me to capture nuggets and search for information.

My needs:
* Store and search quickly: plain text, rich text, html [1]
* Allow me to reference (link to) files (often PDF, word documents) on my disk
* Support attributes/tags (see Adobe Photoshop Album as an example
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopalbum/overview.html)
	* each item/note can be tagged with many different tags
	* the tags are organised in a tree structure
	* tags can be used as part of the search criteria

	An example: If I've a number of items with the "Java" and then I search
"Security" in Java.  Only items tagged Java are searched for the word security.
		
* text search over all entries
	* search must return a list of items (not just jump from one item to the next)*
scales well (handles > ten thousand of entries)
	* search supports regex or (wildcards and booleans)
* doubles as good bookmark manager (after all bookmarks are just knowledge).
* Export all contents to text/RTF/XML format -- so I can change to a different
piece of software at a later date.

Here is what I've tried:
* MDE Infohandler - strange UI, no html support
* Anynotes - database doesn't scale well, no html support, graphics objects must
be pasted in one at a time.
* Mybase - searches to slow
* askSam - no navigable organisation (tree based or otherwise), search only. 
Everything must be added as a form.
* TreePad - no html support
* Zoot - no html support, hostile GUI
* various wikis - can't save HTML files to a wiki except Twiki - which I found
impossible ti manage.
* Zope - too painful to manage.  Managing my notes would be come a fulltime job.
* The Brain - too slow, doesn't scale, ...

After much playing in the past year, I've realised that what I want is
UI/structure of Adobe Photoshop album glued onto a PIM.

Am I expecting too much from Chandler?  

In search of the holy grail
Mark Levison

[1] I need rich text/html because I want to be able save webpages including
pictures for later reference, even if they go offline.

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