What debugging and hacking software do you use?

I use a mixture of IDA and x64dbg, with debugging symbols downloaded from Microsoft's own symbol server for assistance.

If the format of the call is not documented, then it depends. Sometimes IDA will be able to guess correctly for you, and other times you'll have to look at the assembly code. In the worst cases, you might have to copy the function prologue into inline assembly in C++ to prevent memory corruption, but I personally never had to do this. If you're working with Win64 assembly, then it's no big deal. Most 64-bit WinAPI function calls use one single standard call convention, but 32-bit WinAPI is a much bigger mess where the compiler can sometimes generate really weird ones.

If you have debugging symbols, then guessing the correct function to hook can be as simple as searching for various keywords until you find a function that looks like it's the one you want to modify.

Knowing the caller of a function can be difficult sometimes (as is tracking down certain function calls). This particularly applies to C++ virtual methods (i.e. COM applications), which are members of an object rather than a direct pointer to the function in the code itself, meaning that you need to do extra work to track them down. If you want to avoid the hassle, then you can often attach a dynamic debugger (like x64dbg), set a breakpoint within that function, and look at the call stack.

I don't know for ExplorerPatcher, but Windhawk stores symbol files it downloads at %ProgramData%\Windhawk\Engine\Symbols.

Okay, I opebed a dll, but how can I search functions by name for instance?