Trenchbroom. I'm new and it was linked in the guide I found. Later I would try bsp, quark, or radiant, based on various comments I have skimmed across. 

I learned quark first and wish I had put in the extra effort to learn Worldcraft or Radiant back then. Yeah, the quark UX is similar to vector graphics or page layout software. I think what matters more is how much friction there is once you get over the initial learning curve of a tool.

IMO quark has some particular powerful tools (the texturing tools, duplicators, the 'linear mapping' tool for distorting brushwork), but the basic mapping UI is really inefficient. 

I just realised I completely blocked out the horrors of vertex manipulation in Quark.

Ricky: If you share some examples in GA I can take a look. Bicubic = bicubic. Maybe PS adds some sharpening? 

Editors that put everything at your fingertips without collecting it into baby-soft modes and menus are difficult to learn, but once you've learned them they stay out of your way and let you execute. Whether or not you can sit an idiot down in front of some software and have them achieving right away isn't necessarily a measure of how useful the software is.

I'd rather have a cacophony of key and mouse binds and ctrl/alt/shift modes that are always quickly accessible, over having to push past the software trying to explain itself with every action I take. I'm only a beginner once. 

Right, exactly.

That's MODO for me. Everything is there on the UI and it's pretty clicky when you're learning it. However, once you get more advanced and you've got hundreds of hot keys and custom PIE menus and forms set up you can basically turn off the default UI and just fly... 

Heh, I was getting into Maya the other week, and Lun will attest that I messaged him and whined about the shortcuts... but as I've learned some of the shortcuts and the hotbox, it's already feeling good to use, better than 3dMax which I already know. 

I bought Thred after the broken messages of Qmap, followed the whole Quark tree centerpoint on Quark4.07 with modeleditor (unique) to Quark6.3.

Then, after having QRadiant1.4 installed well, I was surprised by the real sharp fitting on the grid and the feeling the maps are more accurate.
What I don't understand is, why maps made in Radiant are so messed up after been used in Quark, as if some of the information gets distorted by integers. 

So ... I'm trying out Radiant 1.5 and I see this is my texture browser:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/Misc/2015-05-27%2020_17_13-W__SteamGames_SteamApps_common_Quake_id1_maps_PJamGameplay.map.jpg

Is there a way I can reclaim the left half of the window? There doesn't seem to be a splitter I can grab or anything. 

Care to elaborate on your love for Radiant? I like it, but I know when I'm in it, I'm not using it to its potential, and don't know where to start on it. It seems every time I went digging I just landed in Q3A Only Ville and was frustrated because I was curious about doing things in Quake. 

The cacophony of keys is how I feel about Blender, it is really nice to use once you are "fluent". An editor like Quark definitely cannot live up to that, it is very point and click. 

I i understand correctly, in Photoshop I would:

* go to image layer, select all, copy, deselect all
* create a new fill layer (whatever solid colour you like)
* go to the channels of the fill layer and make the mask channel visible
* paste the image into the mask channel, make mask channel invisible again (so it isn't all red)

Simple! Or not.... 

Warren: shorter directory path only way, sorry :(

scar3: I mostly just like that it has a good 3 point clipping tool, I can csg merge brushes, and pulling faces keeps adjacent faces at their same angle so you can mitre things and still work with them which makes brush curves stupidly easy. beyond that, it's lots and lots of little things that are just nice and you miss in other editors 

"Warren: shorter directory path only way, sorry :( "

Ugh. Well, there's strike one. Talk about shitty UI design... 

 

Not sure you can blame Radiant 1.5 on ID ... there was plenty of time for the coders working on that to address that crap. :) 

pulling faces keeps adjacent faces at their same angle

I miss this SO MUCH when I have to be in Hammer. I have use for proportional scale handles exactly 0% of the time. Such a dumb, stupid tool.

Having to go into vert mode and gather up all the verts on the faces I want to move is such a chore when I know that in Radiant I'd need just one click and drag in the right place and it's done. 

My voice goes to Jackhammer. 

 

jokes 

QOOLE 

I used QuArK for all of my maps (and still using it on a current "extremely slow progress project"). As spirit said, apart from its floating point issue (that can be resolved by staying on-grid), this is an awesome editor, very easy to take hands on. Also, people from QuArK (http://quark.sourceforge.net/forums/) made a very complete tutorial. Mapping for a mod is also very easy... It has some useful duplicating function, as well as texture tool that are really working well. It also has a terrain tool (never tried it to be honest), as well as various pre-defined brushes, including some "carving/cuting" tools...

Well, I never used others editor, tested some,but never found one that is as easy as QuArK.. maybe I am too lazy to try again... I go for QuArK 

back when I did all my first Q1 maps, this is the editor they used for Aftershock I think. 

and pulling faces keeps adjacent faces at their same angle so you can mitre things and still work with them which makes brush curves stupidly easy

What does this mean exactly? Is this different from what TB does? Just wondering. 

Is this different from what TB does?
Nope, it's exactly what TB does, glad TB does it like that. Worldcraft does a fucked up face move that keeps the face the same size, doesn't scale it based on the adjacent faces, so you have to fix your mitres after resizing things.

I've said before, I used TB for like a year and loved it... but the lack of 2D grid just killed it for me. A few other features I missed were csg merge and texture find/replace.