Until now I was mainly using fGIS when I wanted to view or edit shapefiles, but since a year or two the updates to fGIS are no longer publicly available due to some license issue. Last week I bought an interesting book about opensource GIS and it brought the QGIS application to my attention again. I had tried an earlier build of this application some time ago, but then I found it more difficult to use than fGIS. Now I tried a more recent build and I am impressed, it is a really powerfull application and quite easy to use. So I will replace fGIS by QGIS as my default GIS application for viewing and editing vector data.