Question

How can I select all lines that do not contain the word “hello” in VIM? I need it yanked and then saved to a file. How can I do it? I am looking for something like:

:v/!(hello) > file

Answer 1

:g!/hello/ yank A

The lines are now stored in register a, to paste them do “ap

Edit:
Can be abbreviated to

:g!/hello/y A

For those interested in what this means to vim:

:g = global search
! = negation of boolean test that follows
/hello/ = regular expression to match “hello”
y = command to perform upon each matched line, in this case “yank”
A = register argument to “yank” command. In this case register ‘a’ but in the form of upper case meaning append to the register rather than replace.