The Transcript window is a special form of Workspace. Although it offers nearly all of the facilities of the Workspace, its main purpose is to act as a location where notification messages from the development environment can be logged. Many of the Dolphin development tools use this facility (for instance during package installation) but it is also available as a useful debugging aid when you are developing your own classes.
The main differences between the Transcript and a normal Workspace are that it offers no facilities to be loaded from, or saved to, a disk file and it has no status bar for displaying compilation errors etc.
In general, it is preferable to use a Workspace for general-purpose working.
The Transcript is also a Singleton which means that only one instance can be in existence at any one time. Closing it has the same effect as choosing File/Exit Dolphin but, should you inadvertently manage to destroy it, another will be automatically created for you.
As you develop and debug your Smalltalk code you may find that some objects that you thought would be garbage collected are remaining in your image. This is often caused by them being somehow referenced, either directly or indirectly, from a window which has not been correctly created or destroyed (and is thus residing in a limbo state). This can happen if a Walkback occurs and is terminated during window creation or destruction. Such limbo windows will be invisible and should be removed. For this reason, if you think that you have unwanted references to some objects, we have included a "panic" button (modelled after Munch's "The Scream") on the Transcript toolbar. Use this to destroy ALL open views and start again with a fresh Transcript.