This is a regular expression that matches all words except 'foo'

\v<(foo>)@!\k+>

• \v Very magic
• < Start-of-word
• (Foo>) The atom 'Foo' followed by end-of-word
• @! Match (with zero length) when the previous atom doesn't match.
• \k+ Match one or more Keywords
• > Match end-of-word.

The non-magic version is:

\<\(foo\>\)\@!\k\+\>

The use of \@! can be very tricky. According to the Vim help files, it is often easier to use \@<! instead. For example, to find all 'bar' strings unless they are part of 'foobar', use the following (non-magic):

\(foo\)\@<!bar

References

• :help /\@!

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