Trenchbroom is legitimately among the best software I have ever used. I grew up using Hammer and this simply blows it out of the water.
One nice thing is that you can use it as a level editor for your own games in Godot with func_godot
One nice thing is that you can use it as a level editor for your own games in Godot with func_godot
Godot feels very much held back by how much stuff you need to do in 3rd party apps with flakey or nonexistent integration. Software developers often get shit for the learning curve of IDEs, but nothing has the "damn girl, you live like this?" energy as open source gamedev tooling. Even something pretty basic like doing texture painting in Blender? Jesus H. Christ. Makes The GIMP seem more polished than anything Apple put out at the peak of its polished days.
Strange to read "I grew up using Hammer." when I still see Hammer as a newfangled update to Worldcraft.
No Quake map editor will let you do anything the Quake engine can't, of course.
If you draw your maps on paper first, as id Software did[0], then the editor you use doesn't matter so much.
J.A.C.K.[1] is the current torchbearer for the Hammer lineage.
Also there is a community fork of Trenchbroom[2] that exists because Trenchbroom includes slop. Or "machine generated code" or "wAIfu generated code" or however salves your feelings.
"The map editor everybody uses" is reductionist.