I decided to maintain my own fork of Lemonbar with support for Xft, because GitHub user krypt-n seems to have lost interest in their project.

My fork is on GitLab: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/lemonbar-xft. Here I want to tell you the steps I followed to produce it.

Start by cloning upstream (all my links will be for SSH connections, which require an appropriately-configured GitHub account):

git clone git@github.com:LemonBoy/bar.git ~/lemonbar-upstream

Now also clone the fork with Xft support:

git clone git@github.com:krypt-n/bar.git ~/lemonbar-xft-discontinued

Switch to the upstream repo:

cd ~/lemonbar-upstream

Prepare to pull in the Xft fork:

git remote add xft ~/lemonbar-xft-discontinued
git fetch xft

Now create a new branch with the fork:

git checkout -b xft-port

Then merge master into xft-port:

git merge master

You are mostly done. I just added an extra file that explains what this fork is about. It is named “README-xft” and has the following:

Personal fork of Lemonbar with Xft support
==========================================

The purpose of this fork is to keep up with upstream while maintaining
the changes by GitHub user krypt-n who seems to have lots interest in
the project.[0]

The contributions by krypt-n allow Xft support (to use typefaces
supported by fontconfig).  Upstream Lemonbar appears to be unable or
unwilling to merge them into master.[1]

I have decided to maintain this project, because I want to use it as
part of my custom desktop session on Debian 10 Buster.[2]

[0]: https://github.com/krypt-n/bar/pull/37#issuecomment-473265449
[1]: https://github.com/LemonBoy/bar/issues/188
[2]: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/dotfiles

Lastly, I did the following to push my fork to GitLab:

git remote add lemonbar-xft-current git@gitlab.com:protesilaos/lemonbar-xft.git
git push -u lemonbar-xft-current --all

Done! Read my previous entry on how to compile this fork on Debian 10 Buster.