JWPce is a Japanese word processor that features extensive Japanese dictionary and Kanji data lookup features. Specifically, it is designed to interact with Jim Breen's EDICT and other databases in very intuitive ways. Unlike most programs, installing it involves no changes to the windows registry, so uninstalling it is as simple as deleting the folder where you placed all of its files. Also, the program doesn't access the internet, so it's fast, and if you have a laptop, you can use it anywhere,
Above all this, the entries for the kanji in the database contain the index number of that kanji in James Heisig's Remembering the Kanji books, and most of the time, Heisig's keywords are the first ones listed in the kanji information boxes. This may seem a bit confusing right now, but it will all make sense soon.
JWPce's web page is http://www.physics.ucla.edu/~grosenth/jwpce.html. You can download the most recent version of the program here. That site explains how to do it. The only difference between the .exe (self-expanding) version, and the .zip version is the installation procedure. The program is exactly the same no matter which you choose. You should install Part I and Part II. The manual and help files are useful, but not necessary.
JWPce provides eight kanji lookup methods. For most situations, the radical lookup method is the most useful, and in some cases, the reading lookup is good too. I'll describe both of these:
You can access the radical lookup feature in four ways: by selecting Radical lookup... from the Kanji menu, by pressing Ctrl+L or F5, or by clicking the 21st toolbar button from the left.
You'll see a box with 241 radicals to choose from, arranged by how many strokes each radical has. Select the radicals that you can recognize within the character you're trying to look up. You can further narrow down the search by entering the total number of strokes in the box marked Strokes, and if you're not completely sure about the stroke count, you can click +/-1 or +/-2 to allow a 1 or 2 stroke margin of error in your count. Sometimes what you think is a radical within the kanji may not agree with what JWPce thinks, so occasionally you'll need to do a bit of trial and error.
When you've found the character you're looking for, select it and click Get Info. This will bring up a box with a large version of the character, its meanings and readings, and many different indexes for it. Most of the time, if that character is one of the 3000 from Heisig's books, the first meaning listed will be his keyword. If you click More Info, you can find the Heisig index for that character, so you can easily look it up in RTK.
This is pretty self explanatory. If you know a character's reading, you can enter it and use it to look up more information. Also, if you know the character's English keyword , you can select Keyword in the Type dropdown box and use that to look up the character. You can also enter a stroke count. Select the character and click Get Info to pull up the information box described above.
You can actually customize the Kanji info box so that the Heisig index appears in the box with the meanings and readings, so that you don't have to click More Info every time. To do this, select Setup Char Info... from the Utilities menu. Here, you can choose Heisig from any of the dropdown boxes in the left two columns, to swap it in place of the default. I chose to replace Morohashi with Heisig.
That's it! You're all done. Happy learning.