I had a single file I needed to modify but didn’t want to modify the date of the file. It was a minor change to the file, so I wanted to maintain the file date for posterity. In any case, I learned the vim does not provide this functionality, but touch would and quite easily. With that said, I am familiar with touch and use it quite often, but the following approach proved direct and resolved the problem.
touch -r myfiletoedit timestamp vim myfiletoedit touch -r timestamp myfiletoedit
From the man pages:
-r, --reference=FILE use this file’s times instead of current time
