hmpc is a small command line MPD client. It was written only as a test harness for libmpd-haskell, but even so it has a nifty feature that Haskell makes simple and I now use it in preference to mpc.
hmpc has a command line parser that will accept any command that is an unambiguous truncation of some command's name. If you've used darcs, it works the same way. It also has a few abbreviations - 'p' for play, 'pl' for playlist, and 'ls' for list. I find these three make for many fewer keystrokes. Now it just needs for bash tab-completion to be implemented...
To get the latest sources, first download and install darcs and type:
darcs get http://turing.une.edu.au/~bsinclai/code/hmpc
To update your repository, enter hmpc and type:
darcs pull
Go here to browse the source code.
Instructions are in the README.