Is there a way to do negative lookahead in vim regex?

Question

In Vim, is there a way to search for lines that match say abc but do not also contain xyz later on the line? So the following lines would match:

<

Answer 1

Your attempt was pretty close; you need to pull the .* that allows an arbitrary distance between the match and the asserted later non-match into the negative look-ahead:

/abc\(.*xyz\)\@!

I guess this works because the non-match is attempted for all possible matches of .*, and only when all branches have been exhausted is the \@! declared as fulfilled.