If you're keen on using a Hammer like editor, JACK is right up your alley. It offers many features that Hammer does and more, as well as a very similar user interface.

http://jack.hlfx.ru/en/ 

If you like Hammer/Worldcraft, I suggest:
J.A.C.K. aka Jack Hammer

Another option is Radiant:
Setting Up - Using Radiant

Basically people use: Trenchbroom, JACK or Radiant. All of them are good and it only depends on your preferences. 

Any of the following "big three" are fine. Try them all and see what you prefer.

- JACK - is worldcraft-based. In active development.
- NetRadiant - probably the best Radiant-based editor. No longer in active development
- TrenchBroom - for nuskool kool kidz or whatever. In active development.

I'm an old fart and always prefer Radiant, but if you're new to this just see what works for you. 

but shows we all agree on the "big three" 

Here's the version of netradiant I'm using. Is currently been updated every month or so; lots of useful stuff.

Here you can grab the q1 gamepack.
- and an example build menu 

I never could figure out radiant.

Ya if you like Hammer, J.A.C.K is identical, except for missing displacements (not supported by Quake anyhow) and doesn't show quinstances (yet I hope). J.A.C.K is also much better than Worldcraft in that it doesn't have 4096 world size limitations, it has support for 3D viewport mouselook, 3D models in thr viewport, etc. 

Cheers, I had no idea someone had taken up the NetRadiant mantle again. Interestingly that person has chosen to be known by the nick "Le another black niger". Not sure what to make of that, but the editor seems to work ok and fixes a few of the annoying things about the old NetRadiant I was using. 

Netradiant, but I'm using a 2012 version. 

Awesome, thanks for the tips guys. So NetRadiant or JACK are winners for Q1? Does GTKRadiant work? I know most people who map for Q3A use GTKRadiant.

What are the game packs? Are they like FGD files or something? 

TrenchBroom 2 has orthographic views. You may have been using TB1. 

Cheers for the tip. I'd pretty much given up on Netradiant, but that updated version seems very usable. 

I'm also pretty stuck trying to figure out setting up game configurations and WADs. I'm big on decompiling maps and their content so I can see how things were made. This is pretty easy on the Source engine because BSPSource is a great decompiler and custom content is often packed in the BSP, where it can be easily extracted. Also, Source games include all their content in VPKs and their Hammer already includes game configurations and FGDs, so mapping setup with base content is pretty much completely done for you. But in Quake, I can't find the default WADs and FGDs. They're not in the PAKs. And decompiling maps with WinBSPC rarely works. Even trying to study maps Thebes's are already provided in .map format doesn't work (like in Arcane Dimensions). The textures are missing in the editor and I can't find their WADs. Many of the entities just show up as purple blocks as well. Is this because they're not in the FGD or did most Quake entities not have icons? I'm just really confused, sorry for the long post. 

Uh, meant to say "that", not "Thebes". Autocorrect is nutty. 

you can find a heap of textures here: https://www.quaddicted.com/files/wads/

I think that AD uses a lot of knave textures, it's probably best to extract the textures from the BSP file though.

A FGD file is provided for AD in the zip I believe. 

Quake textures are embedded in the .bsp file. Get TexMex, use it to open the .bsp, then save as .wad 

Oh, so you could pack content in Quake maps? I thought you could only pack in the Source engine. So when you ship a mod, you don't have to include all the WADs? You can just pack them in the BSP? Is there a utility to extract the content for the Quake engine?

And yeah, I have that FGD. I guess the entities just don't have icons. 

JACK can extract the textures from BSPs, I believe TexMex can aswell. For the entities to display I think you just need to point your editor to the correct directory. 

looks like i was too slow

cheers Rick :) 

For stuff other than the textures, a game folder is used. Everything can be in a pak file or just a loose directory structure. There is a certain arrangement that must be followed. 

So I can just use TexMex to create an individual WAD for each AD map? There must be a better way to do that, isn't there a limit to how many WADs you can have loaded in Hammer/JACK/Radiant/whatever?

So did the original Quake team have a proprietary map editor that they never released then? I'm just wondering how they did it if they never actually shipped an editor or textures and entity definitions with the game. I see that there's almost nothing in pak0 besides a gfx WAD, models, maps, and sound files. 

id used software called BSP (I think).

I don't know what tools they used to make wad files or whatnot.

TexMex allows you to export the textures and make one more convenient .wad file. 

So I guess the quake.wad came from people extracting and combining the textures from all the maps in Quake?

Also, starting to figure this stuff out a bit. JACK seems to be the way to go, I have set up configurations for Quake, Half-Life, and Counter-Strike and it seems to be working well. 

BSP was the name of a third-party editor.

Quake's editor was called something like QuakeED. I think they did release the source but it wasn't usable for most people because it required special hardware or OS or that most people didn't have (was it nextstep or a full opengl workstation or something?)

The version of QuakeED for quake 2 was the basis for QERadiant which was third party I think, but then became the official id software editor starting with quake 3. 

Thats normal, Quake doesn't have icons for most point entities. 

You could mess with Texmex...or downloading a bajillion wads from quaddicted or other places...or just use:Qmaster's Collection

This includes all standard ID1, Hipnotic, Rogue, SOA, AD, Kell/Knave, and sundry other textures as well as a few of my own such as blue variants of the knave textures. It's not a complete package but it's more or less sufficient for 95-98% of all Quake maps ever made, roughly.