My Hexen II toolbox

A Hexen II mapper's survival kit

Mapping is a whole set of various technics, and that needs a whole set of tools.
Here are those I use.

TrenchBroom By far the best map editor imho (not that I know too many others, to be honest XD).
It supports full 3D and is user friendly, intuitive, most of people in the community use it and it goes on being improved still nowadays. Ericw tools An indispensable complement to plug TrenchBroom on.
Efficient BSP compilation, light calculations, textures & skins defullbrighting and some other nice features... Notepad++ May sound weird because it's just a text editor, but a powerful one with notably a very efficient multi-file search engine: I use it all the time to find occurrences of entities or properties or whatever I want to know more about, so that I can study how they're used in vanilla Hexen II and understand how things are made. I also use it to code some HexenC. MapSearch For tricky searches involving map file format specificities Notepad++'s generic search engine is not able to deal with, I developed this powerful auxiliary command line tool. Go on the dedicated page to know more about it. :) QuArK An awful complicated counter-intuitive messy map editor imho. Never understood how Rino can enjoy it! :D
Yet besides map editing, it has extremely interesting features, all in one tool, that I use all the time: a pak explorer, a model viewer with skin edition capabilities, a nicer texture browser than TrenchBroom's one, a wad file maker, etc.
I also used to get lumbered with its 3D BSP map explorer to study Raven maps but it was a nightmare to figure out. By chance, I wad told about Bsp2mph2! Bsp2mph2 A BSP decompiler able to turn a BSP file back into a map file. The resulting map is actually leaky as heck, has weird buggy brushes here and there and each face is made a brush, which is the worst thing you might imagine in terms of optimization. But never mind all that: it keeps looking very much like the BSP it comes from and you can explore it with ease in TrenchBroom and comfortably study how it's made without having to suffer with QuArK anymore!
(You can download it from its author's web page which is not maintained anymore for years, so I saved a copy just in case and you can get it directly from here by clicking on ) Quake Model Editor (aka qME) It's another tool for handling mdl models.
I'm not so fond of it but it has a few valuable features I found no equivalent of in QuArK, notably being able to rotate or mirror a model, move its center of gravity... Quake Model Viewer To me its main advantage over qME is that it's extremely easy to identify the animation frames of a model, which greatly helps setting up cutscenes with animated characters. SLADE I use this one mainly to retrieve resources from older games
(sounds, MIDI tracks or graphics from Heretic or Hexen...) Fimg Indispensable and easy-to-use interface for converting lmp files into bmp or other standard image formats, and the other way round.
(You can download it from its author's Google Drive but who knows how long it may stay available this way, so I saved a copy just in case and you can get it directly from here by clicking on ) Lmp2Pcx Complementary command line tool for converting conchars.lmp into pcx format, as this file is not made like other lmp files and is not recognized by Fimg.
(Found somewhere on http://www.gamers.org/pub/idgames2/ but I saved a copy so you can get it directly from here by clicking on ) FTE Qcc FTE's QuakeC/HexenC compiler
My mods involve lots of coding and this compiler is by far the best one I experienced this far, producing a very stable progs.dat. Paint Shop Pro 5  
My favourite image editor to work on textures, model skins and lmp file, once they have been converted to standard image formats with the tools above. Joshua Skelton's tools  
A set of amazing easy-to-use tools for extracting/converting assets and going crazy with modding.